Price - Dignity consists of 2 seemingly identical paintings. One canvas features the word “price” while the other one reads “dignity”. The works display deconstructed and reversed canvases attached to a frame within a frame construction.
With this work the artist investigates our relationship between market price – or other values that depend on our personal attachments – and the dignity of the artist, which is in some sorts priceless and not for sale. Like the philosopher (see quote), the artist wants to prepare a foundation for a moral theory and a conversation about mere worth or human value in our current day and age.
“In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity.” - Immanuel Kant (from: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals)