The Social Life of Things

Overview

In 2009,  Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn did an interesting anthropological  experiment involving eBay, trinkets and made up blurbs. The duo bought hundreds of knick-knacks (costing around $1.25 apiece on average) and then commissioned over 200 contributing writers - including Meg Cabot, William Gibson, Ben Greenman, Sheila Heti, Neil LaBute, Jonathan Lethem, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Jenny Offill, Bruce Sterling, Scarlett Thomas, and Colson Whitehead - to invent stories about each tchotchke. The writers never saw the objects, but imaginatively used various experimental forms of creative writing (handwritten letters, dairy entries, internal monologues, public notice etc.) to create a story for each thrift store-purchased trinket.

The trinkets were then listed on eBay, and Walker and Glenn waited to see whether the stories increased the value of each product. It did: The trinkets, originally purchased for a total of $128.74, sold for a total of $3,612.51. The biggest increase in value was seen in the sale of a globe paperweight. The paperweight was bought for $1.49 ended up being sold for $197.50 - a 2,700% mark up. All due to a handwritten story that Debbie Millman had attached.

The social life of things explores the social value of banal objects using photographic works taken over the last five decades by prominent New Zealand artists such as Bill Culbert, Marti Friedlander, Fiona Pardington, Michael Parekowhai, Yvonne Todd. Each object photographed in the exhibition has cultural, symbolic or personal value to its photographer, the exhibition questioning whether those objects can retain meaning, and whether that value can be transferred to others.