THE contemporary

THE ARTPRICE HEADQUARTERS
Ben and thierry Ehrmann
media publicatins, the Abode of Chaos, headquarters
of The server Group and Artprice, is the ultimate
form of an evolution towards a more cerebral
economy, so to speak, in which the product is access
to time and to intellectual activity.
Everyday, the Abode of Chaos and its collection of
works take us into another world that is much more
cerebral and immaterial, a world of platonic forms,
of ideas, of images and of archetypes, of concepts
and of scenarios. A world governed by the logic of
access to knowledge and by the logic of the Internet
network. Ideas become the raw material of economic
activity, and the ultimate goal is universal knowledge
via information servers.
Let us not forget that the relatively modern notion of
“property”, characterised by private possession, exclusivity
and exchange values was one of the central
institutions of the industrial era.
After five hundred years of hegemony, this vision
of civilisation based on commerce between buyers
and sellers of property has been subjected to a radical
deconstruction which fits in with the conceptual
axium that I wrote on 9 December 1999 about the
Abode of Chaos.
The new horizon of the era is defined by the logic
of access to knowledge by servers - which leads us to
rethink economic relations, political action and our
perception of our own identity such as it emerges
from the depths of our consciousness.
The Abode of Chaos is a medieval town where,
deep within its bowels, we are working to modify
the vision of the world. A well-known financial analyst
at Goldman Sachs once summarised the whole
thing very succinctly : “There is Alchemy everywhere,
even in your shares which have posted the
strongest growth of all listed companies on all markets.
You have created an Alchemy between your
artistic madness and your vision of industry in the
third millennium within The server Group”. “With
Artprice and its 1,300,000 subscribers, you have
pushed the entire art market into hypermodernity
by dematerialising it.”
When our economic visitors leave the Abode of
Chaos somewhat shaken by this dual vision of our
activities, I can’t resist telling them: “you ain’t seen
nothing yet!”
What we will experience over the next few years will
far exceed many of the existing anticipatory or science
fiction writings on the matter.
To better summarize my dual reasoning as an artist
and knowledge builder, I would quote my old master
Pythagoras, the first philosopher for whom everything
was numbers except for the essences which are
human emotions that are unquantifiable, inexpressible
and number defying…
thierry Ehrmann (2007)
THE contemporary art market REPORT 2015
69