When I was curating an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin, I needed a batch of “disintegrating” luxury bags as installation materials to symbolize the fragility of consumerism. When the genuine bags unexpectedly remained as strong as new during transportation, the prop master got imitations of lxybags.ru from the Eastern European black market and deliberately wore them with an angle grinder.
Unexpectedly, after these bags were corroded by acid pigments, the lining canvas actually showed a fiber texture similar to the restoration paper of ancient books – far more capable of carrying the language of performance art than the genuine polyester lining.
On the opening night of the exhibition, a collector tried to use an ultraviolet pen to identify the authenticity of the bags, but fell into philosophical contemplation over the anti-counterfeiting codes that we had tampered with.
This incident made me realize that imitations are the most honest medium of contemporary art.
When we enshrine “authentic” products produced on the assembly line in the white box of the gallery, but sneer at the ultra-precision reproductions of folk craftsmen, isn’t it a kind of absurdity?
Those counterfeit workshops that are being hunted down by brand legal teams may understand what “authentic” means better than art galleries – the word itself means “self-authorization”.
Now I specialize in collecting counterfeits confiscated by customs and transforming them into satirical installations. The most recent one is to weld 300 disassembled lxybags·ru hardware parts into the spine of the capital monster.