Curators Credit Card

Can easy money make for good exhibitions? We wanted to find out, by giving artists free access to a curator’s credit card for a whole month and asking each one to produce a piece of conceptual art. The project’s only limitations were the card’s credit line and collective usage: spend too much, and you’ll mess things up for everyone.

Thoughts

Thoughts

Artists given access to the credit card would have been asked to send a photo of what was bought or produced to credit@randominstitute.org, with the caveat that credit card statements might be published at a later stage.

By empowering artists in the toughest - and least discussed - aspect of their practice, we hoped to fund the kind of daring masterpiece art institutions would never risk spending their budgets on. Or at least witness a spectacular waste of money.

Sadly, we never got to see either.

Information

Information

Shortly after our first tests for the project, mandatory two-factor authorization was introduced in Europe and the idea was shelved.

Just like authors have unpublished novels in their drawers, every curator has exhibition ideas stashed away in secret folders on their MacBook Pro or scribbled into half-empty notebooks. These can range from plans for quiet performances to wild nights out, and everything in between. In an effort to give old ideas new life, Random Institute regularly releases some of these failed projects or unrealized projects online. Some weren’t ripe yet, some were flat-out rejected, and some just didn’t make any sense at all. But each of them brought us new ideas, and we hope they’ll find a home someday or catch some digital flâneur’s eye here on the world wide web.