Markku-Jussi Komulainen: Selling as Art – A Secular Iconostasis

The act of selling and buying is a fundamentally human behavior that we engage in daily. I am often asked: What is the value of your painting, and can you guarantee its value will last? After pondering this question for ten years, I decided to answer it in the form of an art exhibition.

I have chosen the theme of this exhibition to explore the dual monetary value of art and how this value is formed and measured in the context of buying and selling transactions. My medium includes gold and its visual symbols: gold leaf and modern synthetic thin-film materials.

Often, buying and selling transactions require a medium of exchange. In ancient times, people traded goods for other goods, and later for commodities such as squirrel pelts, iron, copper, silver, or gold. Eventually, we invented money to define value, even in the form of paper currency. Today, we are moving towards electronic systems for measuring value.

The Dual Monetary Value of a Visual Artwork

In one of my paintings, I have embedded a 10-gram gold bar. This gives the painting a specific real value, or what can be called an instrumental value.

Traditionally, the price of a painting encompasses all its values, and the price is always determined at the moment of sale or purchase. In this exhibition, one of the values of a painting can be measured daily according to the price of gold. In this way, the painting attains a dual monetary value.

In the context of visual art, themes such as reproducibility, anonymity and conceptuality have already been explored. I now add the concept of dual monetary value to this context.

For the first artwork, I define the ratio of real value to instrumental value as approximately 1/5. It will be fascinating to see if, over time, that ratio becomes 1/1, 10/1, 1/100, 1/1000, or something else entirely.

Markku-Jussi Komulainen