Self Checkout

Self Checkout puts the equipment of a shop inside an art fair. Jalil Wahdatehagh and I made it, and Visualize Value presented it in Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach from 3 to 7 December 2025.

A visitor walks up to a kiosk, picks an amount and gets a thermal receipt whose length depends on what they paid. Each dollar adds paper. A split-flap display on the wall clicks through my running balance. It opened at -$74,211.00, the cost of being at the fair and building the work, which I carried myself. Five days later it closed at +$114,706.51.

There were 5,837 receipts: 3,475 onchain, 263 online and 2,099 in person. The average was $11.41.

Martha Buskirk's Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace argues that understanding art cannot be separated from the business of presenting it to the public. The publisher's description says that as strategies of institutional critique have given way to collaboration or accommodation, art and museum conventions have both been profoundly altered by their ongoing relationship.

At a fair the presentation and the sale happen in the same room. In Self Checkout the transaction is out in the open, and so is the cost of showing.

For years the stock complaint about NFTs was that they were "just receipts". Self Checkout agrees and makes the receipt the artwork.

Participants choose their contribution. That changes the length of their receipt and adds to the balance on the wall. It gives them no control over the installation's rules.

X Museum, Beijing later acquired the physical installation.

If the receipt is the work, what did the person who paid more actually get? A longer receipt, and more added to the number on the wall. Every receipt, long or short, carries a printed seed phrase for a non-transferable digital companion.