Toothfish - New Zealand Show

The latest show by the entity currently known as Toothfish was at Photospace Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand.

If you were there you would have seen  the latest posters, screen-prints, t-shirts, paintings and ritual masks and a monitor showed a slide-show of photos of Toothfish posters up all over the world.

You can vicariously experience a pale reflection here.

To promote the exhibition Toothfish held an auction of a print of it's retracted poster, 'Art or Death' on the New Zealand online auction site - Trade Me. The print came with a free New Zealand $50 note. The auction got over 1000 views during the week and the print(together with the note) finally sold for NZ$86 which meant the purchaser still got it cheaper than the website/gallery price of $50.

Much of the work in the show addressed the way in which our governments seem intent on  selling everything in one great big final fire-sale before the environment collapses completely. But  clearly in the event of a major disaster (when existing markets have collapsed) a room full of food is more valuable than a room full of cash. And what about art? Does that have any intrinsic value at all or is it all just another  sales campaign where people's names are marketed like soap brands and the art itself doesn't really matter at all?

Toothfish doesn't buy that. On opening night it re-wrote the rules of the gallery. While many of the works were for sale in the usual way others were presented in a diametrically opposite fashion where Toothfish offered NZ$50 each for  three works to be removed from the gallery. Naturally they were snapped up with one of the 'un-purchaser's' using his $50 note to buy another print.

Fuck art! Fuck money! It's the environment that really counts!

Toothfish would like to thank James Gilberd, Diane Davis, Kat Spears, Sheridan Orr, Bev Hong, Garry Hunter, Ben and The Magenta Diamond.