Grimes Is Selling A Piece Of Her Soul
Grimes/Maccarone Gallery
Grimes is selling her soul. Literally. Starting today, Bloomberg reports, she’s exhibiting her first fine art show online on Gallery Platform Los Angeles (5/28-6/3) and Maccarone Los Angeles (5/28-8/31). The show is called Selling Out. And included in it is a work also titled Selling Out: a legal document whereby the purchaser acquires a percentage of Grimes’ soul.
When she began to conceive of the piece, Grimes tells Bloomberg, “I didn’t want anyone to buy it, so I said we should just make it $10 million and then it probably won’t sell.” But “the deeper we got with it, the more philosophically interesting it became,” she says. “Also, I really wanted to collaborate with my lawyer on art. The idea of fantastical art in the form of legal documents just seems very intriguing to me.”
How much does a soul go for these days, you might wonder — especially in this economic climate? “With the current state of the world, do you want to put something up for $10 million?” Grimes asks rhetorically. The price she eventually settled on? “Best offer.”
The rest of the show is slightly less conceptual and more traditional visual art — if you consider Grimes’ “edgy-looking, anime-horror” aesthetic, which she’s been showcasing on her own album covers and tour merchandise for years, traditional. “I made art 10, 12 years before I ever touched a keyboard,” she says. “I see myself as a visual artist first and foremost, and I’ve always felt strange that people know me for music.”
Grimes’ prints come in editions of 30 and cost $500. Her ink-on-paper drawings range from $2000 to $3000. And archival pigment prints of digital works featuring the WarNymph avatar scanned from her own body run from $5000 to $15,000, depending on size. (There’s also a video work, AI Meditations Led By WarNymph, for which a price has not yet been set.) All the art comes with a certificate of authenticity.
And yes, Grimes knows that “gallery art has always been prohibitively expensive.” Which is why she regularly purchases original prints and drawings at Patreon for around “10 or 15 bucks a month.” Do the people she’s supporting on Patreon know that she’s actually Grimes? “Probably not,” she says. “My email [address] is really strange.”
