Seth Price

Seth Price (born 1973 in Palestine) is a New York City-based multi-disciplinary post-conceptual artist.

He lives and works in New York City.

Price was born in the village of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Palestine in 1973.

His parents had travelled to Sheikh Jarrah on behalf of the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee and established a legal aid clinic for the local Palestinian population.

Price lived there until he was two years old.

Price then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended Brookline public schools.

He later attended Brown University where he received his BA in 1998.

Price has described his ethnic heritage as "Welsh/Greek/American WASP."

Price published Dispersion in 2002 as a self-published booklet.

It has been translated into 7 languages and been bootlegged in a variety of ways, including a "Cult Classic" version from Burn Rate Berlin, which includes Kanye West "Wisdom Quotes" interspersed throughout.

Talking to the Believer 10 years after Dispersion's initial publication Price said "I started writing that essay not because of any interest in the internet, but out of frustration about how to be an artist, or whether I even should "be" one. Is it possible to make objects anymore? Is that interesting? So really it was my thinking through how to enter this other world, and when I finished it, I thought the text itself might be a piece."

Price has released cassettes, CDs, vinyl LPs and files through labels that include Audio Visual Arts, Dais Records, Period Tapes, Free103point9 and Distributed History.

The film Redistribution (2007-ongoing) had a week-long theatrical run at New York's Metrograph Cinema in September 2019.

Price published How to Disappear in America in 2008 and it was adapted into a musical by Ei Arakawa.

Price was also referred to by artist and critic John Kelsey as, "one of the original trolls of contemporary art" and art critic Tom Moody described his 2009 Art F City essay Teen Image as "entertaining but incoherent."

In 2011 during Mens Fashion Week, Price debuted a line of military-inspired garments, designed with Tim Hamilton, in a vacant storefront in downtown New York.

In 2012 his 2002 CD Army Jacket was re-released in a 10-year anniversary vinyl pressing.

The garment line was developed further for a presentation at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, where he staged a fashion show in the town's underground parking garage.

Novelist Rachel Kushner called Price's work a "Vision so accurate it becomes fiction."

Between 2013 and 2014 Price took a year away from doing shows and other art world activities.

Around the same time, he tried to have all press, interviews and photos of him removed from the internet.

Some critics have interpreted this attempt as a work in its own right; however, when asked about it in an interview with Kim Gordon for Bomb magazine, Price said: “I never really called it a work.

I just thought I would try it.”

Price has spoken about dropping out of social media, distrusting the cloud, and the importance of avoiding predictability.

Seth Price is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York City, Galerie Chantal Crousal, Paris; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi and Capitain Petzel, Berlin.

In 2015 Price published the novel F*ck Seth Price.

Before publication, an excerpt appeared in Harper's Magazine and it was part of The Believer Magazine's "favorite fiction of 2015".

In 2015, writing for the New York Times Style Magazine, musician/artist Kim Gordon named it as one of her favorite books, calling it "the best description of the art world ever."

In 2015 Price was hired by clothing company Brioni to model for its Fall/Winter ad campaign.

A photograph by Collier Schorr of this advertisement appearing in the New Yorker was used as the cover design of the second edition of F*ck Seth Price.

In 2015 Price created Organic Software a website providing algorithmically-mined data on prominent art collectors and their political donations.

Originally intending to remain anonymous, Price was revealed as the creator of the site by Vice Magazine in 2017.

Writing for Texte zur Kunst in 2017, Price recounts taking a year's hiatus from the art world: shutting down his studio and attempting to write a young adult novel while pursuing the "dumb goal" of removing traces of himself from the internet.

At the end of the hiatus and in an attempt to "bend my frustration toward something productive" Price wrote the autofiction novel "F*ck Seth Price" to which organic.software served as a companion piece.

In 2018 art critic Andrew Russeth described Price's show, Seth Price: Hell Has Everything at Petzel Gallery as one of the “weirdest shows of the year” and said that “it feels like such an exacting depiction of life in New York right now.”

Price has described a major theme in his work as "the tension between material life and dematerialized life," and spoken of it as a response to the last twenty years’ "trend of increasing abstraction... in finance, the distancing of technology, and the effects of digital tools. Social media accelerates that, and moves it to the realm of the self, where we’re being asked to live in the material and immaterial realms at the same moment."

In The Brooklyn Rail, Price said of his "Silhouettes" series: "I never wanted people to look at the 'Silhouettes' and understand how fucking annoying it is to unite plastic and wood. I wanted it to look like that process always existed."

Recently, Price published "Machine Time" in Heavy Traffic 1; in a year's end roundup in The Paris Review assistant editor Olivia Kan-Sperling cited it as "the best fiction I read this year;" it was also acclaimed in Interview Magazine . In 2020, Price published the poetry book Dedicated to Life, which was conceived as a part of a gallery exhibition at Isabella Bortolozzi.

Steve Zultanski called it one of his "favourite recent poetry books" in an article for Spike Magazine.

Montez press radio did a 24-hour marathon of Price's original music April 20, 2020.