Seth Price (born 1973 in Palestine) is a New York City-based multi-disciplinary post-conceptual artist.[1][2][3] He lives and works in New York City.[4]
Early life
Price was born in the village of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Palestine in 1973. His parents had travelled to Sheikh Jarrah on behalf of the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee and established a legal aid clinic for the local Palestinian population.[5] Price lived there until he was two years old. Price then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended Brookline public schools. He later attended Brown University where he received his BA in 1998.[5]
Price has described his ethnic heritage as "Welsh/Greek/American WASP."[5]
Writing
Recently, Price published "Machine Time" in Heavy Traffic 1; in a year's end roundup in The ParisReview[6] assistant editor Olivia Kan-Sperling cited it as "the best fiction I read this year;" it was also acclaimed in Interview Magazine[7]. In 2020, Price published the poetry book Dedicated to Life, which was conceived as a part of a gallery exhibition at Isabella Bortolozzi. Steve Zultanski called it one of his "favourite recent poetry books" in an article for Spike Magazine.[8]
In 2015 Price published the novel F*ck Seth Price. Before publication, an excerpt appeared in Harper's Magazine[9] and it was part of The Believer Magazine's "favorite fiction of 2015".[10] In 2015, writing for the New York Times Style Magazine, musician/artist Kim Gordon named it as one of her favorite books, calling it "the best description of the art world ever."[11]
Price published How to Disappear in America in 2008 and it was adapted into a musical by Ei Arakawa.
Price published Dispersion in 2002 as a self-published booklet. It has been translated into 7 languages and been bootlegged in a variety of ways, including a "Cult Classic" version from Burn Rate Berlin, which includes Kanye West "Wisdom Quotes" interspersed throughout.
Talking to the Believer 10 years after Dispersion's initial publication Price said "I started writing that essay not because of any interest in the internet, but out of frustration about how to be an artist, or whether I even should "be" one. Is it possible to make objects anymore? Is that interesting? So really it was my thinking through how to enter this other world, and when I finished it, I thought the text itself might be a piece."[12]
Music
Price has released cassettes, CDs, vinyl LPs and files through labels that include Audio Visual Arts, Dais Records, Period Tapes, Free103point9 and Distributed History. In 2012 his 2002 CD Army Jacket was re-released in a 10-year anniversary vinyl pressing.[13]Montez Press Radio, broadcast a 24-hour marathon of Price's original music April 20, 2020.[14]
Other projects
The film Redistribution (2007-ongoing) had a week-long theatrical run at New York's Metrograph Cinema in September 2019.[15]
In 2015 Price was hired by clothing company Brioni to model for its Fall/Winter ad campaign. A photograph by Collier Schorr of this advertisement appearing in the New Yorker was used as the cover design of the second edition of F*ck Seth Price.[16]
In 2015 Price created Organic Software a website providing algorithmically-mined data on prominent art collectors and their political donations. Originally intending to remain anonymous, Price was revealed as the creator of the site by Vice Magazine in 2017.[17] Writing for Texte zur Kunst in 2017, Price recounts taking a year's hiatus from the art world: shutting down his studio and attempting to write a young adult novel while pursuing the "dumb goal" of removing traces of himself from the internet. At the end of the hiatus and in an attempt to "bend my frustration toward something productive" Price wrote the autofiction novel "F*ck Seth Price" to which organic.software served as a companion piece.[18]
In 2011 during Mens Fashion Week, Price debuted a line of military-inspired garments, designed with Tim Hamilton, in a vacant storefront in downtown New York. The garment line was developed further for a presentation at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, where he staged a fashion show in the town's underground parking garage.
Reception and interpretation
Novelist Rachel Kushner called Price's work a "Vision so accurate it becomes fiction."[19] Price was also referred to by artist and critic John Kelsey as, "one of the original trolls of contemporary art"[20] and art critic Tom Moody described his 2009 Art F City essay Teen Image as "entertaining but incoherent."[21] In 2018 art critic Andrew Russeth described Price's show, Seth Price: Hell Has Everything at Petzel Gallery as one of the “weirdest shows of the year” and said that “it feels like such an exacting depiction of life in New York right now.”[22]
Price has described a major theme in his work as "the tension between material life and dematerialized life," and spoken of it as a response to the last twenty years’ "trend of increasing abstraction... in finance, the distancing of technology, and the effects of digital tools. Social media accelerates that, and moves it to the realm of the self, where we’re being asked to live in the material and immaterial realms at the same moment."[23] In The Brooklyn Rail, Price said of his "Silhouettes" series: "I never wanted people to look at the 'Silhouettes' and understand how fucking annoying it is to unite plastic and wood. I wanted it to look like that process always existed."[24]
Between 2013 and 2014 Price took a year away from doing shows and other art world activities. Around the same time, he tried to have all press, interviews and photos of him removed from the internet.[25] Some critics have interpreted this attempt as a work in its own right; however, when asked about it in an interview with Kim Gordon for Bomb magazine, Price said: “I never really called it a work. I just thought I would try it.”[26]
Price has spoken about dropping out of social media,[25] distrusting the cloud,[27] and the importance of avoiding predictability.[28]
Art market
Seth Price is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York City, Galerie Chantal Crousal, Paris; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; and Capitain Petzel, Berlin.[29][30][31][32][33][34] At a 2014 Christie's auction in New York, a golden, vacuum formed polystyrene piece by Price called Vintage Bomber (2006) sold for $785,000, sweeping past its high estimate of $70,000.[35]
Honors and awards
In 2020 Price, was honored at a benefit hosted by Rhizome.[36]
Price has been part of board of directors for Artists Space since 2009.[37]
Seth Price was the subject of a one-year research program from 2017 to 2018 at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, called "Seth Price is on Our Mind," which included a regular private study group as well as a series of public events, activities, talks and commissioned essays.[38]
Seth Price was honored at Printed Matter's first annual benefit in 2017.[citation needed]
Price received the Golden Lion Award at the Biennial de Lyon in 2007.[citation needed]
Partial exhibition history
Solo exhibitions
In 2017 the ICA London presented a survey of Price's film and video works co-curated by the Institute's director Stefan Kalmár, Richard Birkett and Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey.[39] Price opted not to be involved in the planning and installation of the show, later explaining that he asked to be treated "as a dead artist."[40]
In 2017 Price was the subject of a survey exhibition of 17 years of work at the Stedilijk Museum, Amsterdam, curated by Beatrix Ruf and Achim Höchdorfer.[41] The exhibition then travelled to Museum Brandhorst, Munich."[42]
Further solo exhibitions include:
2016
Wrok, Fmaily, Freidns, 356 Mission Rd, Los Angeles[43]
2015
Drawings: Studies for Works 2000–2015, Petzel Gallery, New York[44]
