STEINBACH ON EBAY
HS: eBay is this collective of non-hierarchy where you can access anything you want at any time. You’re not going to be more prejudiced and say, “I’m not going to look for this because that’s low. It’s low art. It’s not important, it’s not worth my time. I’m going to go to the Artnet, and look at great art. I’m going to look at this, because I have values and standards. Why waste an hour looking for all kinds of stupid stuff on eBay?” But what if you let yourself just go for a few hours and look at the stupid stuff that shows up there? What do you make out of that? What do you find? What do you learn?
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HS: I know artists who are constantly on eBay collecting images for their work. I do very little of that. I’m on eBay all the time: I’m on it when I walk down the street and bump into a rock on the ground. I look at it and I say, “What is it? Why is it here? What kind of rock is it?” There’s this instant awareness when you hit something, you realize that you’re living in a picture world – eBay and the computer is already in your mind, and you’re ahead.
PJ: You know, a while back I asked an artist friend how he looks when he’s searching for material on the web. And he said [paraphrasing], “When you read a newspaper, you’re looking at the column of the text. If you’re browsing in a context, in an art context, you’re looking at everything. You’re not just looking at the object. You’re looking at how everything is placed in the browser. You’re looking at everything in the screen.” And I wonder whether there’s some similarity between that process and the process of walking down the street and looking at everything and looking at it without hierarchical concerns. They sound sort of similar to me.
HS: Well, here’s the difference. To preserve ourselves, it’s our nature to look at things with hierarchical concerns, whether those are based on belief and religion, or on language that we brought, or on whether we are literate or illiterate. The tools that we have control the way that we engage the world. We all have internal restrictions that are already part of us, and they make us focus on certain things in a world where you can see everything.
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