The Month of Reckoning

A social media performance art piece

Ever since I won the lottery, I have been wanting to create a series in which I give away art pieces on US dollars. Madman levels of insanity and overthinking have plagued my mind over the past few weeks, trying to decide on how I should go about it. What do I want to attempt to say with this series? I knew that I wanted to give it a greater context than simply “art on dollars”. I’ve been working on my USDREADYMADE collection for 2 years now, and I feel like I have already fleshed out why I do this particular thing.

If you don’t know, here’s a quick recap of the general intention behind the USDREADYMADE series. I put art on dollar bills as a form of protest against the validity of money. I look at it as an act of civil disobedience, very similar to graffiti. Any graffiti artist would agree that the goal is not to make a building uglier, but to beautify the space even further. I think the ultimate goal for graffiti artists would be for one of their tags to stay up for many years. This is also my goal with the USDREADYMADES. The best-case scenario would be that these bills, imbued with a new sense of character thanks to my pen and pencil, will “stay up” for many years, silently travelling the United States, switching through thousands of different wallets, cash registers, banks, restaurants, stores, and countless other establishments.

As for the giveaway series, which I will be calling “The Month of Reckoning” since I plan to give away a small amount of money every day for the month of August, the post is the piece. The dollar bill is merely a vehicle that I am using to conduct a piece of Social Media Performance Art, or SMPA. I have done pieces that can considered SMPA in the past: I did one called “The Eve of Valentine’s Day” in which I took a screen recording of myself scrolling down twitter and liking every single piece for 10 minutes straight. I also did one called “the eve of September 11”, in which I unfollowed everyone on my Instagram account as a sort of “purge”.

I really look at these pieces as science experiments. I am very interested to see how my follower base reacts to the Month of Reckoning. My hypotheses are as follows.

I think my regular supporters will gladly participate, since they would’ve interacted with my art regardless of if there was money involved or not. If you’re one of these people, I seriously cannot thank you enough. You are the reason I keep going. As artists, we die a little inside when we are not championed in some way, and people do not realize how much a simple like, share, or comment on a piece of art means to us. I hope with all my heart that my true supporters win some of the money, but I do know there is a real chance that someone I don’t even know will participate JUST because they want to win money, not because they want to support me as an artist.

This is where the most valuable information lies. With this series I want to explore the world of artificial/transactional support in the world of social media. My short time in an internet art collective left me a bit jaded with the social media art world, specifically the “crypto art” space or the “NFT art” space or the “twitter art” space or whatever you want to call it.

I’ll always be grateful for the time I spent in that art collective, because it showed me that “organic growth” is not a real thing, not in the modern art world, nor in the traditional art world. It is all about association. Once I had retweets, likes and follows from prominent people in the space, I started to receive even more support, like a wildfire that was growing exponentially. Artists I had been following for YEARS suddenly started to notice my art only because I was associated with other “big names”. This was a shocking realization to me. It felt like they looked at my association with the collective as “permission“ to fuck with my work, and I’m not necessarily mad about it, but I’m sad that I was so naive at one point to think that I would naturally gain traction as an artist over time. I didn’t realize that shilling my work in group chats and having mutuals with other “clouted” artists was the most important thing I could do for my art career.

This kind of thing happens all the time in social media. We’ve all seen someone’s account suddenly take off when they receive a follow from a celebrity. Think about it: if someone like Kanye West suddenly follows you on Instagram, people notice that. They react with your account differently. I’m not necessarily saying it’s right, it’s just a thing that happens. I’ve already started to notice this phenomenon within my own work, and with the Month of Reckoning, I’m attempting to challenge that a bit by introducing money, an item with inherent value, to the work. I believe this will force people to come out of the woodworks and start supporting my art, only because there is something in it for them. If I can see this with my own eyes, this series will have been a success.

There are many other reasons why I am starting this art series. It’s one of those things that came to me from a higher power, and left me trying to interpret it after the fact. I will keep my substack updated with all my thoughts on the series as it progresses. If you want to participate, follow @youthusa and/or @youreadymades on Instagram.