My Brain on Art-O-Mat®

It’s more fun than Pez and more addictive than crack.

I nearly lost my mind when I stepped into District Taco and spotted the Art-O-Mat® against the wall. It’s a refurbished cigarette machine, but instead of vending cancer sticks, it dispatches micro art pieces for five bucks a hit.

Of course, I immediately started plugging it with money and pulling the levers.

When I’d exhausted my small bills and coins, I begged Husband for more. He shot me The Eye as I rifled through his pants’ pockets and relieved him of a Lincoln while he placed our order.

My lack of cash capped my spend at three pen and ink drawings by Ella Ver from Series 3: Scenes From Life. They included Man On His Computer, Little Home in Mountain View and Coffee Break, each mounted on a wooden base the size of a deck of cards. Accomplished, accessible, inexpensive and tiny-cute, they hit all the targets for an impulse buy. Though for their experiential value alone, I would have paid at least twice as much.

Not a gambler by nature, I suddenly appreciated the attraction of slot machines. Arguably, the Art-O-Mat® is a kind of Pavlovian machine of chance – putting in money, not knowing exactly what will drop down, offering an immediate reward, leaving one wanting more. That same thunderbolt I felt when I walked in and saw it I regularly feel while discovering public art, opening the drawers of Lola Rosa, or recording the myriad ideas that pop into my head, threatening to set it alight. A kind of writhing ecstasy it is, an ideagasm.

So, considering the mesmerizing effect of the Art-O-Mat®, is it possible that artists in the economic middle – those without large galleries and representation and spots at the biennales – are selling art and craft all wrong? Doesn’t it challenge the ingrained idea, as the virtual world does, that art won’t sell unless the artist or an agent is present? That the ‘human touch’ is central to why people buy or don’t buy? To why they get excited?

Since art and (much) craft is an impulse buy, maybe we need more gamification like the Art-O-Mat® and fewer pricey art show booths, bastions of guilt and awkward salesmanship, especially for the dear introverts amongst us, buyers and sellers. I want to buy what I want, when I want it, to (theoretically) plunk in the money, pull the lever, and leave energized – a win-win, no-hard-feelings proposition. 

So, how about bringing art to the audience, then, and not the other way around? I rarely attend art sales, studio tours, or house tours because I don’t like being held captive in an exhibition space. I want to fall into a reverie, walk around inside of my head, and not be continuously interrupted or told how to look at something, implied or overt. I pretty much vant to be left alone.

So, how about thinking integration instead of the forced segregation of an “art show,“ installing work in plain sight, in high-traffic places where people don’t normally look for art and craft such as supermarkets, libraries, hotels, banks, hockey rinks and salons? Why not introduce the art of surprise by way of physical location?

Original art is addictive but one can’t buy it if one can’t find it, experience it and purchase it quickly and easily. Maybe it needs to be knocked off its pedestal and peddled more commonly, as an ordinary – not extraordinary – purchase: Art as a basic necessity of life, a source of elusive happiness.

From the Art-O-Mat® website:

The inspiration for Art-o-mat® came to artist Clark Whittington while observing a friend who had a Pavlovian reaction to the crinkle of cellophane. When the friend heard someone opening a snack, he had the uncontrollable urge to have one too.

There are more than 400 contributing artists from 10 countries and over 100 installed machines, mostly across the United States.

Artists in Cellophane (AIC) is the sponsoring organization of Art-o-mat®. The mission of AIC is to encourage art consumption by combining the worlds of art and commerce in an innovative form.