Art Bodega and the Market
Artist Lucy Sparrow created a convenience store made from simply felt stitched together and painted. The exhibition was an installation that acted as a convenience store, each piece resembling some sort of commercial item that was actually sold on the spot to the viewers. In fact, every convenience store item was sold over a week before the exhibition was supposed to close. This was an interesting exhibit in the fact that the items being sold ranged anywhere from 25 to 100 dollars, making the commercial artwork accessible to the average consumer.
With this accessibility in mind, and the selling out of all of the priced items, it would still be an unfair assumption to consider the artwork market clearing or a perfect matching. Due to the nature of the author of the article, it seemed as though the demand for the 9,000 items was high–higher than the supply. If prices are market clearing, then all items would be sold, but all buyers would receive an item as well. Therefore, it would be unreasonable to assume that the artwork did indeed have market-clearing prices. Therefore, this also becomes more complex in the fact that some of the buyers were purchasing more than one item–some even a dozen pieces. As a result, it is safe to assume that this is not a perfect matching because there would be constricted sets since the number of buyers in general wanting the items exceeds the number of items. This leads to the idea of simply a matching and sparks a rather interesting perspective on art as both accessible to the general public and art as a market.
It may also be assumed that this type of marketing technique was not necessarily the most profitable for the seller. The reason for this is that if the pieces in the installation had such a high demand, it can be assumed that in an auction-type setting, the work could have earned profits greater than its remarkable $500,000. However, the amount and type of people who go to auctions may decrease the accessibility of the work, and therefore, the work may not have sold out like it did.