Some
people donate their body to science; the artist puts his up for
sale on the Internet—not surprising given that he’s
already sold both time and color online, not to mention artistic
square meter parcels of land through newspaper ads! Indeed, in this
online work, the artist’s body is for sale piece by piece—like
cuts of meat in a butcher display case or lots in a real estate
promoter’s subdivision. Each parcel of flesh purchased or
rented was in reality a small section of a larger interactive image
onto which the new titular occupant planted a small flag. In addition
to being an ironic overstatement of the idea that the Internet is
little more than a vast electronic marketplace, an apparent assertion
of the declining importance of the body in an age of virtual reality,
an implicit comparison between the territorial nature of the body
and that of the Internet, and an aging artist’s fantasy of
immortality, the work could perhaps also been seen as a tongue-in-cheek
attempt to found a sort of mystical body of Internet users on the
basis of something akin to a virtual human sacrifice.