EXPENSIVE FIASCO / CHEAP SUCCESS
Centre for Visual Introspection, Bucharest
Curator: Alina Serban

Expensive Fiasco / Cheap Success
26 x 58 cm, neon + b/w print with marker

4706 represents the place Ioana Nemes occupies in Artfacts.Net ranking, an online guide of modern and contemporary art. Gathering info from the web, the guide attempts to forecast an artist’s carrier according to the number and importance of the exhibitions the artist had until that point. Artfacts.Net operates on the basis of the economy of attention principle, a term developed in 1999 by Georg Franck in the same title book.

Franck asserts that attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that functions according to the same principles as capitalism. Thus, the curator, museum director or gallerist act as financial investors, investing attention in the artist from which more attention and reputation (fame) are expected to be paid back.

The international ranking numbers around 41,000 artists organized according to the attention index they have. The more exhibitions the artist had in influent institutions and galleries, the smaller his/her index. Currently, Andy Warhol is in poll position while Thomas A. Ostbye is the last one, with index number 40,822.

Expensive Fiasco / Cheap Success is intended as a series unfolding over the next 10 years, documenting the position the artist will hold each year within Artfacts.Net ranking. The series addresses art collectors that consult this site, nevertheless it works against the economic logic on which the site is based, since the price of the work will equal the ranking index. The more Nemes will climb the hierarchy, the cheaper the work, and vice versa, the more she will descend in the classification, the bigger the work’s price.

Letter to a Young Artist
or What Is Expected from a Romanian Artist
in the International Art System
120 x 180 cm, vinyl letters on wall

The work quotes Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Tailored for the reality of the contemporary art scene in Romania, the work dissects how, in order to be integrated, young artists must mould themselves according to the expectations of the Western scene. The text indirectly unveils the enormous differences between the Western developed art system and the almost inexistent Romanian one.

CV as a Constellation
50 x 35 cm, acrylic on paper

The black-and-white painting is a graphic visualization of the artist’s CV under the form of a constellation. It presents curators and gallerists – under the form of different sized planets – that influenced her artistic parcours.

For the organization of planets two grids were used: quantity – the number of projects and exhibitions in which artist, curators and gallerists worked together and quality – representing the degree of intellectual influence (through dialogue and idea exchanges) they wielded on the artist. Thus, the closer the planets are to the centre of the constellation, the bigger the number of projects, while the size of the planets reflects the intellectual influence. The work implies that in the current international art system the number of exhibitions is no longer important, but rather the number of influent curators the artist knows, therefore his capacity of self promotion.

Pure Honesty
115 x 115, acrylic on canvas

Having the exact measurements of John Baldessari’s Pure Beauty (1966-1968), Pure Honesty pleads against the carrier competition in which young artists active within the local and international art scene are engaged today.

How to Judge Character from Face (Self-Portait)
70 x 50 cm, pencil on paper

The self-portrait is drawn upon consulting a physiognomy book from the 50’s. The physiognomy is the art of determining people’s character from the form or features of the face, or the talent to recognize one’s interior from his or her exterior.