Added Value [Dodana vrijednost] was a mass media intervention by Lara Badurina who questions the system of value in contemporary society in regards to art, mass media, design, advertisement and industrial objects. I have collaborated with Badurina as a text writer of three short consecutive texts to be published weekly in Novi List Daily, Rijeka, Croatia on 8th, 15th and 22nd May, 2010. The prints were exhibited as news paper piles at 45th Zagreb Salon, HDLU Gallery [Croatian Association of Artists Gallery] in 2010
The basic elements of the series Advertisement are scepticism about the value systems in the various fields of work and the inquiry about the ways of reception of visual and textual information, which legitimise and promote those systems. The essential doubt derives from the artist’s reflection on her own work, i.e. from a value system determining the position of her activity in the society. If politics presents power and manual work is comparably powerless, then an economic field that surpasses the basic existential needs, like health care, nutrition and social security, represents an added value. Therefore sports (including automobilism) and fine arts can be interpreted as essentially equivalent fields. With both fields we are encountering a”beautiful« object that becomes an object of desire, whose market value is not set by material but, rather, aesthetic values. Despite this, cultural workers have a tendency to consider their own work as being outside the economic currents, as an exclusively symbolic activity. Due to many examples of such attitude, various fields of work are separated by strict social, educational and conceptual differences. One of the rare social locations where all of these fields meet is the mass-media. Consequently, the Added Value piece wishes to dislocate itself from the fine arts context and intervene into the mass-media, to relativize the divides between different fields of work and to treat automobilism and art on equal terms.
Three media interventions in Novi list Daily (Rijeka) will occupy one third of the newspaper’s page (260×380 mm). The intervention in a format of 260×125 millimeters will contain a textual and a pictorial part. The photographs will show close-ups and details of prestigious automobile brands. The text will be a mimicry of art historian topics with the use of automobile marketing terminology. The work will be published on the pages of three different editorial boards, which are not connected to culture or automobilism, i.e. the pages covering domestic and international politics and similar.
[title] Added Value | Limited Series
[artist] Lara Badurina
[photography] Jasenko Rasol
[text] Ida Hiršenfelder
[publisher] Novi list, 3 editions, 260×125 mm (3 photographs and text: 200 words)
[exhibited at] Zagrebški salon, HDLU Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia, 2010
[duration of the exhibition] 8th May to 30th May, 2010