Like
“Video Portrait of a Collector in Real Time” (no 14)
and “The Artistic Square Meter” (no 22) this work involves
an artistic commodity of a conceptual nature that (ironically) takes
on added esthetic value through its use as prop in a performance
designed to raise questions about how art is invested with symbolic
capital, traded, distributed, and consumed in the age of information
and electronic media. In this case, the commodity in question is
a password granting the purchaser exclusive access to a web site
hosting an original digital work titled “Network Parcel,”
and the performance is the public auction—the first of its
kind to be carried live on the Internet—at which it is sold.