Negotiations (2011)
Negotiations is a book that operates through multiplicity. At once a word-for-word reproduction of a Christie’s New York antiques auction catalog from 1983, it is also a meditation on reproduction itself—of images, texts, and the abstraction of value within art and its markets. It stages a negotiation between encyclopedic information, subjectivity, and interpretation.
The book unfolds in layers. Part one presents a modulated facsimile of the original catalog, including its descriptions of lots, provenance, conditions of sale, and legal disclaimers. Each lot is accompanied by a corresponding image: a magnified halftone fragment taken from the catalog’s photographs. These enlargements transform the image into an abstraction—an abstraction made from a representation that was already a mediation of the object itself.
Following the facsimile are a series of appendices: a) a glossary of technical terms; b) a brief essay on the history and function of the halftone pattern; c) an image atlas.
By weaving together these materials, Negotiations provides the reader with a framework for dialogical reading, where the book functions simultaneously as a material artifact and a discursive system. It asks how value is constructed, circulated, and abstracted—and how meaning emerges in the space between image and text.