sigh. i often ran into this in art school. i am thoroughly convinced that as long as you can justify it/ explain it, then it can be defined as "art", whether you agree with it or not. amazing that he is getting $10K though, makes me a little jealous!

seriously? this is a scam.. don't you get that? you cannot buy something that only exists in your own imagination.

if you buy into this perhaps you will also invest in my bridge to the afterlife.. its only $10 per person...

Proof that as a society we have disgusting amounts of money to throw around. OTOH, this could be a fantastic fundraiser. Think of the number of poor women that could receive pre-natal care with that amount of money. Healthy newborns in the arms of mothers is the best art.

I would love to buy a piece of this non-existing art if they will take my non-existing money.

The 'idea' is transferred to the card and therefore the card is the physical piece of art. The actual art is the interaction that one has with the card. It's is worth $10K because someone thought it was worth $10K. Maybe someone else would pay for that, maybe not. When you view or gaze on to a painting or sculpture you might feel an interaction with the piece on the wall. Admiration, guilt, horror, any of those emotions that the chemicals in your body make you feel is the act of art. The painting on the wall is just a bunch of paint, canvas, metal or whatever the constructor of the piece put together. Mr. Franco constructed the idea and expressed it with ink and paper in an envelope. I feel a little astonished from it, I think I understand it, but it does not hold my attention. I would not buy it for 10 cents, but someone is either starstruck or they understand it and it probably has some philosophical impact on them.

This is hilarious. James Franco doesn't need 10 grand. This a social experiment. Genius.

So... if I think about this beautiful, delicious air without sending in my $10,000 is that copyright infringement? And if I blow that air in someone's face is that unauthorized distribution?

This makes me love James Franco even more.

Awesome. My sister and I used to joke about all these 'exclusive condos' about town that never get built (they just remain empty fields or lots) and say that they are sooo exclusive that they never get built—you just buy the 'idea' of the condo and the bragging rights to say that you bought an oh-so exclusive fancy-schmancy condo. I love this.

Hmm. Whoever spent 10k certainly deserved what he got for it. James Franco really should be ashamed of himself for taking money like that though.

@Penguin Dreams, brilliant!

This is so, so lame--like this is some novel idea. Conceptual art (the idea is more important than the object) has been around forever starting with Duchamp in the early 1900s and taking off in the 1960s.

The problem with this is that Franco's idea is so shallow and uninspired. Check out someone like Yoko Ono and you'll see why conceptual art can be inspiring. For example (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/egg/209/ono/interview_content_2.html):
""Morning Piece" is one of my favorite of Yoko Ono's events...For "Morning Piece," she sent out announcements to her friends, all leading artists in the Tokyo underground avant-garde movement of the early 1960s, and invited them to meet on a rooftop on a specific day in May 1962. She had taken broken shards of a milk bottle and attached to each a future date of a morning -- May 18th, 1989. Which for us in 2001 is like imagining a date in 2029. Improbably future ideas. And she laid these out in a very systematic grid on a table on the rooftop in Tokyo, and sold them for anywhere from 10 yen to 1,000 yen. Totally arbitrary prices. And they were sold to many of the most luminary figures in the Tokyo avant-garde at that time. What is so interesting about this is [that] Yoko, in her quiet, subversive way, is upending the whole idea of art as commodity by selling these improbable future ideas. What is also so intriguing and wonderful about this work is the element, again, of wonder."

I feel a lot of you are placing art into a very generalized tangible category, when there is no "real" definition to what art actually is.

I may be giving him too much credit by saying "he's onto something", but his idea is very straightforward: the world of thought is very much real, and very valuable. To conjure an image, such as the capability of owning one's own endless flow of fresh air, and twisting the concept with words to such an extent that the admirer is emotionally, intellectually, or sensually captivated... I think I'd classify that as "art".

Although it is a shame someone had to pay $10k to become able to use a little imagination.

This reminds me of a hilarious play I saw quite about 10 years ago...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Art'_(play)

Wow I don't think Franco thought through the minefields he's walking into here. This air has lots of sociopolitical battles fought over it. Every city ordinance has varying standards for quality control. Al Gore's air, the law-evading sneak paying off fake CO2 emission test results to keep driving their clunkers 'cause they can't afford an acceptable-emission vehicle, the bong-lover blowing their smoke into the air of their anti-weed neighbor's breathing space...
As with prior examples of Yoko, Warhol, Hirst, Duchamp and heck even Joaquin, Franco is in lurvvve with his celebrity "wit" much more than thesis-making. For an actor's self-promo though, it's got the age-old role-play charms of the snakeoil salesman/magician's illusion: punchy and charming provocations of "this wonderous beaut you can buy...whddya mean you want to see it? feel it, touch it?" It's a bit gothic HC Andersen.

edit: "UNLIKE prior examples of Yoko..."

edit: "UNLIKE prior examples of Yoko..."

Best comments so far: Cactina & Penguin Dreams, awesome.

This is idiotic and would only be acceptable if Franco had the decency to donate the $10,000 to charity, rather than fund yet another vanity project.

If the money was donated to a charity, then I say, sell as much air as you'd like!

Any air Franco's selling is likely to get you real high.

I wonder if she would have bought the "Fresh Air" from someone who wasn't attractive. Good looking people can sell just about anything.

Imagination is inborn in almost every one, so it's free to all. Art involves using skill, talent, and work to develop a significant idea into a form that can be communicated to other people, whether a book, song, or painting. This seems a souvenir, like an autographed photo, rather than art because the bit of writing on the card isn't much.

As far as the 10 K token buyer, you can't protect a fool from himself. A self-proclaimed artist can spit on the floor or smear crap on the wall and claim it's art, but a reasonable person won't buy it. An exception would be if the purchase actually were a donation, like charity auctions or the $200-a-plate dinners objectively worth $20.

Conceptual art, or con job?

does anyone else remember that calvin and hobbes where they're standing in a beautiful, snowy landscape and calvin signs his name in the snow and then offers to sell the piece to hobbes for a ridiculous sum?

Seems like James is thumbing his nose at us, just as he did when he cohosted the Oscars earlier this year. Someone needs to tell him that his 15 minutes are up.

The Emperor's New Clothes?

My comment was deleted. It seems like there is a lot of that going around here lately.

wtf

SUCH BS. I always thought he was a Douchey wanna-be artist. His book is TERRIBLE. But this... THIS takes the cake. What a jerk.

Eh...it's nothing new.

I worked in a museum while in college, and we had a Kader Attia exhibit where "Ghost" was displayed. The installation was made and displayed on-site, but Centre Pompidou owns the rights to the piece. So even though you could buy one of the individual shells [and by the end of the exhibit they were all sold], you couldn't keep it. Little cards were sent out saying you were the collector of a piece that was destroyed in accordance with licensing agreements.

Millions of poor people, usually minorities, living in unhealthy environments with no clean air, imaginary or otherwise. Let's tell *them* to imagine nice pure air whenever their children have asthma attacks. But only if they can pay $10,000 bucks first.

Somebody please tell me whether James Franco has ever done anything that really benefitted another human being who needed help. Or is he too busy being an artist for that?

And I think it's a great mistake to compare this latest exploit from James Franco to anything Yoko Ono has done. Yoko Ono has a lifetime of work that she created to make a point, of one kind or another. Only just recently, she's been back in Japan, trying to encourage artists and others to return to Japan, after so many cancelled trips after the tsunami. She's using her fame to help her people recover from a disaster. Her life is filled with caring acts like that.

Franco, on the other hand, made $10,000. For...I can't say what, exactly. This is not art. It's celebrity indulgence, a product of our sick society. I'd better stop now; I'm starting to sound like one of those evangelical types...and I'm as liberal as they come.

my only question is:
how does that relate to apartment therapy?
correct me if im wrong but i though that the "mission" of AT was to "make the world better one room at the time" not trying to be another site about the "stupidity of the stars".
show me a room i can dream about,not a dissapointment of a person....

i could see selling an idea if it was brilliant- like having an amazing novel written just for you. but his is nothing special.
she bought it just because she's a fan, her loss.
by the way, i love james franco!

and i just realized that if i had money and fame, i'd do all kinds of crazy crap just because i could. who wouldn't?

ridiculous

It's an idea, a thought, written or spoken. It's poetry, it's creative writing, it's art. If you all knew the price of most original art, you'd be shocked, and I don't see how this is much different. How much would someone spend on an original prose written just for them by an artist they admire? Apparently $10K. I'm sure Brittney Spears could get even more for a scribble on a piece of paper, so...

I'm surprised that Yves Klein hasn't been mentioned at all in the course of discussion that has followed this ridiculous gesture.

Yves Klein was exhibiting "Le Vide" (The Void) in France, 1958, which was simply an empty gallery space. He then sold pieces of the void for gold, providing buyers with a certificate. People then were asked to destroy their certificates in order to truly own the void, etc. Anyway, look it up if you're interested. Then came Piero Manzoni, inspired by Klein, who sold his own feces in an effort to make a parody of the art market; a fascinating critique of consumerism and the waste we create.

These men were brilliant. They were innovative and dedicated to making their audiences reconsider the society they live in and create.

James Franco is a plagiarist and a fool. It's unfortunate that people know nothing about the great artists who have come before him.

Every comment posted here, negative or positive, exponentially validates the exchange that was made. You unwittingly breath more life into the art by publicly expressing how it makes you feel. Given this has blown over even into interior design blogs (albeit popular ones), considering the buyer's background and motivation-I'd say she is one smart shopper who found herself a fantastic bargain.