Justin Gignac (@justingignac) is a recovering Advertising Art Director and a current NYC-based artist/entrepreneur who talked at the PSFK Conference in New York City about his art. Justin like most agency folk is an idea guy who said that he wanted to make his ideas happen and that in advertising he spent more time “talking about them, focus grouping them, over analyzing them and then killing them”. So he quit his job and decided to take a shot at turning those ideas into reality and art.
Justin is an idea hoarder and his criteria for figuring out if an idea was going to get past the idea stage are pretty self-explanatory, they have to be smart (obviously), simple (instead of a 30 second pitch think of it in a single sentence), surprising and the most important thing is WILL ANYONE GIVE A SHIT.
He picked up garbage in New York City and wanted to show that packaging was important so he went on to make the garbage pretty and sell it and boy did “nyc garbage” sell. They sold so well he raised the price to curb the demand from $10 to $25 and to $50 with each price increase changing the perception of value that people had of it.
They went from the $10 gag gift, to a souvenir and at $50 a piece of art. The more exclusive the trash the higher the price and he charged $100 for New Year’s Eve trash and so on. He has been doing it for 10 years and has sold over 1300 cubes of garbage to over 30 countries.
Another project he and his wife did was for “wants for sale” where they created paintings of things they wanted and charged the cost of what the item actually was so they could go out and buy it. He combines highbrow and lowbrow for the tension in-between to play with people’s perception of value. They sent it to friends and soon blogs got hold of it and within a few days they had a ton of hits on the website and sold out of the paintings except for the one at the absurd range of the scale.
For Justin creating the art was only half the equation, when it was sold that completes it. With the internet there are no excuses for anyone, the internet is magic as they say. Remember don’t be an ass hole and you learn pretty fast that you can’t do it all alone. It is all about tapping into people you know.
Man what crazy ideas Justin has had and done I for one am officially a fan of the weirdness. How awesome is that he just went for it so I take his example as an inspiration to stop being afraid and just get started and go nuts. His ideas are totally random and WTF that I can’t help but like it.
Always know that you are working towards putting work out there, that is a great perspective and I am gonna steal it. The talk made me grin, the ideas made me smile and the entire deal made me want to start creating, and so if that was the mission then for me it is accomplished.
That is a summary of his talk but seeing is believing so go go go:
PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011: Justin Gignac from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.
Credit: PSFK Conference NYC 2011