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From 'The Avant Garde, Again' by Alex Farquharson:

"For ‘Incubator’ (2001) Carey Young ‘outsourced’ [her] role to Pól Ó Móráin: a venture capitalist with Xerox Venture Labs, where the artist was undertaking a residency funded by East England Arts. Small start-up companies formed within Xerox as a result of their research work go through an ‘incubation’ period, nurtured by teams of specialists, before they are let loose in the wilds of the market. A vital component of this process is brainstorming, here called a ‘visioning workshop’, where the directors of infant companies are encouraged to think radically, and perhaps abstractly, about the potential for their business — to come up with ‘crazy ideas’ and ‘blue sky scenarios’, irrespective of their current resources. These are then compared with examples from a wide range of industry sectors in order to help breed the Darwinian fittest.

The participants in the visioning workshop in ‘Incubator’ were the directors of Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, the small-ish, respected commercial space in East London. After the event, the work existed as an edited video of the two-hour workshop, the office furniture and detritus of the meeting, along with the full transcript of the proceedings, together with Ó Móráin’s follow-up suggestions in preparation for subsequent sessions, reproduced on a Xerox copier, of course, and available for sale as an inexpensive multiple (the artist ironically returning to traditional modes of selling works of art).

The workshop began by focussing on defining the gallery’s product and its existing markets. Despite the innovation and diversity of contemporary art itself, from Pól Ó Móráin’s business perspective, the way it is sold is conventional, outmoded and unimaginative. This first half of the workshop confirmed his impressions: product (art) from the same dozen or so suppliers (artists) is shown in one outlet (the gallery), and marketed conventionally through ads in trade (art) magazines to three market segments (private collectors, museums and corporate collections).

The gallery directors were then encouraged to identify new market segments, new ways of reaching them, ways of increasing product supply, or not seeing what they’re offering as a product at all, but as a service or an experience along the lines of the ways most products are now marketed to consumers (as aspirational lifestyle, for example). This way of thinking necessarily involves breaking the mould of the gallery system. It also rides roughshod over the principle that it is the artists’ role to determine the art they make, as one of Ó Móráin’s lines of enquiry makes clear:

“How do you define the lifetime of an artist?”... “Don’t you try to influence what the artists produce?”... “Do you think there is any flexibility in terms of generating more pieces of art per artist?”... “But if you take that piece of art and produce it in a hundred different colours then isn’t that still unique?”.... “What we’re trying to do here is not necessarily what’s right. In other words, could you have an exploitative approach to art and art marketing?”

The gallery directors respond in three different ways: either by following his lead with suggestions of their own, or not responding at all, or by hitting the brakes — a representative example of the latter is: “Well, I think in the end a gallery is gallery — it’s about a space that puts on exhibitions. You can’t really get away from that.” Ó Móráin responds by laying down some basic market principles: “There’s a concept in the marketplace in general that you don’t in any sense expect the client to come to you. You understand who they are, where they are, and what they want, and you bring the product to them. You give it to them in any way that makes it easy for them.”

By discounting ‘what’s right’ (the interests of the gallery’s artists, the creative integrity of the art work, the idea that art cannot be reduced to commodity, the reluctance to be seen to be commercially motivated, etcetera), the objective becomes very pure — to increase profit. By cutting out the ethical paradoxes that inevitably enfold the business of art, the venture capitalist is able to conceive of radical ways of expanding art’s market and perhaps its potential audience (art investment portfolios, product placement in celebrities’ houses, exhibitions at professional networking events, television ads, hospitality on Concorde, and so on).

Ironically, many of Ó Móráin’s examples reflect key innovations of the avant-garde of the last century, such as the multiple, intervention, art-as-commerce, the site-specific, the notion that the avant-garde is perpetually renewing itself (built-in obsolescence), the artist as service provider, and the idea that the artist may outsource the actual making of objects. Young, in fact, has incorporated most of these avant-garde strategies in the form of ‘Incubator’ itself, along with specific references to two 70s works that broke the art/money taboo early on: Chris Burden’s ‘Full Financial Disclosure’ (1977), a disclosure of his year’s earnings on television, and Michael Asher’s untitled act of removing the wall dividing the exhibition space and the office at Copley Gallery, in L.A. in 1974. In ‘Incubator’ the vectors of the avant-gardes of art and the information economy converge uncannily — what were binary oppositions appear entwined, rhizomatically, in a single matrix. Ironically it’s the business structure around art that clings to the conventional ‘value propositions’  (Ó Móráin) of its product and market: scarcity, uniqueness, permanence; exclusivity, prior knowledge, single outlets, existing markets. When it comes to the business of art it seems artists have a monopoly on innovation. ‘Incubator’ appears to draw the ironic conclusion that avant-garde artists have more in common with leading edge business strategists than with gallerists that sell their work." 

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Video still from Incubator