Experiments, not mine sadly.

I thought this was really cool and you guys might find it cool too.

It's an art project started by a former PhD student in my lab (he's now a posdoc at Stanford) and it seems that he's been doing a bunch of these little art experiments on the side. Maybe you've heard of it, it's already 2 years old, but www.onethousandpaintings.com is sort of a commentary on the art market - like how a Jackson Pollock which is completely abstract is worth millions, but my random doodles are worth nothing (to the untrained eye), however if Pollock copied my doodles, his would be worth millions even though the content is the same.
To test this, he removed all the content from his paintings and just painted numbers: from 1 - 1000, so that there would be an element of uniqueness, but that those numbers would also determine price.

ex.
For painting 40, the price would be 1000 - 40 = 960 USD

However, you'd get a discount based on how many paintings have already been sold, a 90% discount if less than a hundred have been sold, 80% discount if less than 200 have been sold, etc.

In 2 years he's sold 789 paintings so far, and has started another project where he paints and sells art bonds.

Anyway, I thought it was a really neat experiment and worth a blogging.

You can watch him talk about it at a Google talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIbyLlnKk9s

His accent is very Swiss in case you were interested, he sounds exactly like the other Swiss Germans in the lab (who sound nothing like the Germans or the Austrians).

Check out more of his projects:
http://www.onethousandpaintings.com/home/
http://www.365specialdays.com/home/
http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

The last one is particularly cool, and below is a screenshot of our blog in graph form.
As of 22/10/2008, 22:04 o clock, this is the state we are in: