Spot Price (2023) is a series of blockchain-based artworks that offer views of the Seller’s diseased brain and investments in the drugs targeting such images.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease diagnosed by identifying and analyzing white spots on brain scans. These spots mark the “attacks” that characterize the early stage of MS, and have proven to be a source of immense, hidden value. Ever since the first “disease-modifying treatment”, from 1993, drug approval has been based on the capacity to decrease the number and size of the spots on patients’ scans, not on long term clinical benefits. In other words, the image has become the disease. And the conflation of the two has unlocked an extraordinary market for pharmaceuticals.

The spots pictured in Spot Price are from the Seller’s brain. The series includes three sets of five MRIs, with each set consisting of scans that were created when the Seller was prescribed the drug named in the title. The works include a pricing mechanism that fixes the price of each work to the current price for a one-month supply of the named drug.

Spot Price offers a peek inside the Seller’s head as well as an investment in the economy built on the white spots, which is sure to thrive for as long as the image is seen as the disease.

Spot Price (2023) is released by Nome Gallery with Triple Canopy. Smart contract by Alberto Granzotto. The debut of Spot Price coincided with Triple Canopy’s publication of “Regions of Interest,” Goldin+Senneby’s essay on living with multiple sclerosis and being turned into a source of valuable data for pharmaceutical companies.

Reviews:

Alioto, Daisy. ”Spot price: Art and autoimmunity”, Dirt, October 25, 2023.

Schwarz, Gabrielle. ”A Bitter Pill” in Outland, December 14, 2023.