This work is a living examination of how the art market has changed (& is changing), what we value as a society, what art is (/could/should be) worth, and the nature of art in general and how it intersects with the human experience. hopefully it raises questions that will linger with my audience for years to come. Everything that is a product of my creative efforts for the rest of my life will belong to the collector of this piece - each of my works acting as a receipt of another portion of my career passing. I hope that will be many many pieces over many many more years.

This is art about art. questions about questions. It’s dumb and smart and good and bad and will take me the rest of my life to complete.

Lets imagine you were buying a painting from an artist who has practiced for years.
You love the work - it’s colors, shapes, brushstrokes, the composition.
But you might not stop to think about the fact that you’re paying for more than a painting. You’re paying for the time they spent thinking about it, gathering supplies, mixing colors, looking at the subject… to say nothing of the years and years of effort honing their craft with innumerable creations before it. You’re buying a snapshot of all of the lessons, trials, joys and flashes of inspiration that led to the production of that painting.
If you bought it straight from the artist you’d be putting money in their pocket to hopefully be able to keep creating work. If you bought it from a gallery, a dealer or an auction house, hopefully your purchase both strengthens the market for their work (so they can continue to create art to meet the rising demand), and supports individuals and institutions who strive to enable the artist’s continued work.

But what if that artist didn’t ever again have to wonder if their next piece was salable? Didn’t have to change their message or tone or color palate or style to try to match a certain vibe of marketability? Didn’t have to worry about whether the thing they create would pay their rent this month?
Would that artist’s work suffer or suddenly blossom?

Thinking outside of art, if I was working at a job I liked, doing work I enjoyed, with people I cared about, and my boss approached me to say that I could choose to work there for the rest of my career and in exchange get a lump-sum payment of a life-changing sum of money so that I could do my best on my work without fear that some idea I have could jeopardize my ability to pay my bills - I would take that deal in a heartbeat.
Some people would choose NOT to, believing that they could make more on their own and desire to additional freedom of being able to “sell” their time to whomever they wished, but removing anxiety around financial instability would make ME come alive in that hypothetical situation.

That’s essentially what this piece is.

Nobody has ever sold their career.
Plenty of people have worked at one company their whole lives or sold the rights to all the songs they’ve written or auctioned off huge collections of work created over a lifetime…
Plenty of people have had patrons or investors who believed in their vision and skill and provided resources to a creator in hopes of favorable social standing or grand returns in the future…
But no artist has landed right between those two ideas and sold their actual career.

What does that look like?
I suggest that it means that any and all creative ventures I pursue moving forward belong to the collector of this piece. Every painting, every sculpture, every artistic photograph, every conceptual work - no longer mine. If I write a successful children’s book, or a screenplay that got picked up by a major studio, or recorded a double-platinum album? All of the profits would belong to the collector of this piece. If my efforts became popular and high demand meant the collector of this piece could sell every new work for huge sums (or licensed to manufacturers, etc.)? Well then maybe the collector would end up turning a massive profit. I would see any/all of those things not as individual artworks on their own, but as receipts to the collector for another portion of my career having come to be.

If I got to choose what happens to this piece, I might cross my fingers that it would be donated to a museum so that the rest of my career becomes accessible to the public, or purchased by someone who who thinks that art should be approachable and readily available to everyone, but I might not get such a choice. I believe that’s an important tension in this piece, and that transactions in and around art impact what is and will be created, and if I had a mortal enemy (I don’t) who purchased my career, and I spent the rest of my life seeing my creative efforts go into the coffers of my nemesis, I think it would only strengthen the work, to be honest - and I would still be eternally thankful that I would be able to spend the rest of my life creating art.

If you haven’t already guessed by reading this, the artworks that have shaken me to my core and helped shape the way I think have consistently been “conceptual” art. Works where the idea/question/issue the artist wants their audience to consider is often more important to the artist than even what the work looks like.
That’s not to say I can’t appreciate or love other art - everything from Monet’s landscapes to Vangough’s portraits to Rothko’s big color fields all hold a special place in my heart (and at times have moved me to tears). But I personally don’t walk away from Monet’s haystacks with burning questions. Pieces like Erwin Wurm’s One-Minute Sculptures, though, linger with me for decades. They leave me with a sense of urgency - a desire to find someone to discuss what it means to create, to be an artist, to be human.
I see a photorealistic still life and I’m impressed with the skill it took to create it, but I see Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (perfect lovers),” and spend a week choking back tears thinking about it.
I pass a Jeff Koons balloon dog in a gallery window and I may smile, but I read the plaque of Michael Craig-Martin’s “An Oak Tree,” I laugh, and I’m haunted by its implications for years.

In short: I love (and make lots of) more traditional visual artworks (paintings, sculptures, etc.), but the work that really makes my heart sing are the works I’ve made where the depth of an idea is what drives me.

This piece tries to balance the best of both worlds.

In the portfolio section of this site you can find some conceptual works of mine, some works I hope to start in the near future, and some more traditional pieces (mainly paintings). When I first started this piece I wrote more than 10,000 words about it (not kidding), but I think that this single, updated short article is enough to answer the main questions I’ve encountered since I started:

ASDFNA;SLDKFM;ASDJF;ASIJE

…………………………………..

• The 1st article is a look at what this work is: You Can Buy My Career For $5 Million

• The 2nd is a bit of art history that informed my path to this piece: The History Behind the $5,000,000 Career

• The 3rd examines the math behind the price tag: $5,000,000 Math

• The 4th outlines a few people/types of people who might want to collect this piece: Who in the World Would Buy This?!

• The 5th is a more complete examination of the questions and issues at the heart of this whole project: What Does It MEAN?!, and

• The 6th gives you a look at who I am, what I care about, and some series I want to work on: Why Who I Am matters

Whether you have questions, comments, gifts of cash, or serious inquiries, I look forward to hearing from you.
Just shoot an email to:
Juan @ BuyMyCareer . com
(“Juan” being short for my old nickname “Juan Blanco”)

If you want to peruse a collection of previous works, head to my portfolio page.