Art that sells itself

On Jan. 28, while on a business trip to Chicago, Terence Spies used his iPhone to monitor an eBay auction. He was trying to outbid a couple of rivals to win a black plastic box that was at the time on display at an art gallery in Seattle. Spies had read about “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter,” as the piece is called, on a Reuters financial blog. That’s a strange-enough place for a collector to learn about art, but Spies’s interest seems even more curious given that the blogger Felix Salmon’s write-up of the piece’s sale was titled “The Uncollectible Artwork.” Even if Spies won the object, created by a young artist named Caleb Larsen, his ownership would be tentative: the technical innards of “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” carried a program that would relist the thing on eBay every week, forever. Indeed, the terms and conditions for submitting a bid clearly stipulated that the device must be connected to the Internet, constantly trying to resell itself at a higher price to someone else.

The minimum bid was $2,500. Spies won with a bid of $6,350. “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” had generated a fair amount of buzz online when it first went up for sale as part of a show of Larsen’s work at Seattle’s Lawrimore Project gallery. And I understood why people found the concept compelling (or annoying) enough to write about it. But I wanted to know why somebody would find it compelling enough to spend thousands of real dollars to sort of own that concept.

Spies, who is the chief technology officer at Voltage Security in Palo Alto, Calif., describes himself as a collector of “baffling contemporary art.” (He mentions the almost monochrome panels of Anne Appleby and Molly Springfield’s meticulous drawings of photocopies.) He says another collector once advised him to buy art that “people have a reaction to — good or bad.” And “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” has elicited reactions ranging from “You’re really crazy” to “You’re slightly crazy.” He’s O.K. with that. It “sets people off,” he continues, “because it’s not even clear what you own.”

Read the NYT story here.