Auction Stand for Personal Hate (2001)
A notecard I attempted to sell on eBay after the site blocked the sale of my personal contempt for $50,000.
I attempted to sell my personal contempt on eBay on May 28, 2001. The bid reached $50,000 before eBay stopped the auction, invoking a policy against the sale of intangible goods. You can find an early replica of the auction page (when bidding was at $51) here.
Highest Bidder receives the utmost of contempt from the seller. From the date of its reception, I will require your name and address. From the time I receive this information, I will consider you with disgust, hate, and malice. I will not assist you in any way, shape, or form. I will consider you with bitterness and resentment. When I am faced with the acceptance of any failure in my life- be it in my career or my personal life, I will consider you to blame.
It will be a safe, comfortable hatred from a distance, the kind of hatred that has no physical manifestation. From this, you may live in safety without fear of danger coming to you through this purchase. My hatred will not be the result of religion, color, race, or gender, nor will it stem from disabilities. It will grow out of the essence of your being. It will rise from the day you were born. [Include your birthday and I will place a black box over the date when it appears in calendars.]
It will be aimed at your core, at the essence of who you are as a person. You will exist solely as a name on which I may transfer my own inability to accept failure and disappointment. You will become a myth, a legend, a kind of devil on which I may blame all that is wrong with the world.
In a sense, you may consider this purchase the purchase of blame for my fate and therefore you become fate itself for just one human being, which one does not very often get to do these days. There will not be any flaming excrement on your door, or death threats, or scary emails or late night phone calls. Instead, you will receive my hatred in the form of forced apathy. I will deliberately assail the thought of your existence in my mind as if it is a lie, but I will know it is true. Shipping charges negligible.
The piece was part of a commission for MTAA’s “Website Unseen” series, where they sold commissions for titles of art pieces and then subcontracted a handful of those commissions.
The final piece for MTAA came in the form of this very ugly documentation of the process of selling my hatred on eBay, including some correspondence.
The piece was briefly mentioned by NBC News in a piece called “Dude Doesn’t Want His Life, So Why Would You?” about artists using eBay for conceptual art in 2008.
In 2022 I found the original image (which was scanned for eBay using a low-end scanner in 2001) in my archives.
