LG Williams Presents Artworks During Desert X 2019
This Desert X press release stages the desert as a theater of money, speculation, foreclosure, and art-world hallucination. Williams presents For Sale: One Billion Three Hundred and Fifty Million Dollars--or 3 X Salvator Mundi as a site-specific project that converts the abandoned architecture of Twentynine Palms into an obscene real-estate and art-market price tag. The work's title folds bailout arithmetic, Leonardo's auction mythology, and California desert ruin into one glittering joke about value after human connection has been replaced by numbers. Its anger is not nostalgic; it understands that the landscape itself has become a screen for purchases, reinventions, and pseudo-human digital exchanges. The project's dedication to Andrea Zittel and A-Z West tightens the local context, making the desert both witness and accomplice.
- DATE:
- February 8, 2019
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Andrea Zittel; Leonardo da Vinci; Salvator Mundi
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Estate of LG Williams; Desert X; A-Z West; Derazhne-Fridman Charitable Trust; Ace Hotel & Swim Club
- KEYWORDS:
- desert as hallucination theater; foreclosure as site-specificity; Salvator Mundi price as obscenity; bailout arithmetic meets Leonardo; California desert ruin as screen; value after human connection; Twentynine Palms as art-market accomplice