The name is the asset
Jared Goldberg’s art asks a blunt question. Who can name a work, set its price and make that price count?
The answer does not sit in one object. It sits in a system made from the person, the artist, the institution and the market.
Jared Goldberg is the legal person. Jared the Jew is the artist and public name. Duchamped is the institution that shows and certifies the work. The Pitch turns the work into a financial claim. Each part lends force to the rest.
To Duchamp
Goldberg describes his method with a verb: to Duchamp.
To Duchamp is to take a thing and build a new frame around it. The source can stay in view. Its owner, use and worth can still change.
The act can use an image, an object, a brand, a myth or a price. Most of all, it can use Goldberg’s own name.
“Jared the Jew” began as words used to hurt him. He took the slur and made it his mark. The insult became his public name and artistic material.
That act does not make the name safe. Goldberg can claim it, print it and build an institution around it. He cannot control each reading. A bigot can say it. A Jewish viewer can reject it. A museum can fear it. A collector can buy it.
Jared the Jew is a self-portrait that Goldberg can make but never own in full. That lack of control is part of the work.
The Pitch
The Pitch turns this identity into an economic system.
At its core is Sperme d’artiste. The set has ten works at $2.5 million each. Ten times $2.5 million makes a stated value of $25 million.
The arithmetic is exact. The value is not.
Goldberg has not found the true sale price. He has set an ask. If he will not cut it, the claim stays open. He does not prove the worth. He stops a lower sale from proving him wrong.
Price becomes part of the art. So do scarcity, investor language and the pledge to make more. The artist’s body becomes factory, stock and reserve. A blunt joke about “seed capital” turns reproduction into an edition system.
The risk is part of the work
The Pitch also takes on an antisemitic myth: the lie that Jews secretly control wealth and finance. Here, nothing is hidden. Jared the Jew makes the work, controls the stock, sets the price and shows each step in public.
The work does not say the lie is true. It takes the lie and puts it in a new frame. Yet the artist cannot rule the end. A hostile viewer may take the act at face value. A buyer may turn the critique into one more luxury good. A sale at the full ask would make a made-up sum look like proof.
The satire could enter the system it describes.
That risk is not a flaw around the work. It is the work.
Duchamped holds the full art practice: the manifesto, the artists, the archive, the works and The Pitch. JaredGoldberg.org maps the parts. Duchamped puts them to work.