Last week the College Art Association held its annual conference in Boston.

Participants wear identical nametags. Some are worn proudly for peers to see and invite friendly chats from new and old friends, others turned around to obscure the wearer’s name and thus advertise the idea that he or she is so important that the only option among the admiring and fawning throngs is to go incognito, and still others are pocketed to avoid all that trouble in the illusion that there is an escape from the performative machine. Thus we established and aspiring professionals from the worlds of art, academia, criticism, publishing, museums, and curating gather for several days of self-provocation, self-development, and self-affirmation, which regularly amount to the same thing.

One participant in that conference, Portland’s own adventuresome art/artist distribution enterprise Slop Art, staged a subversive but entirely earnest (and CAA-sanctioned) retooling of the artist’s professional development seminar, a staple of any industry conference.

We caught up with Slop’s entrepreneurs to find out more about their aims, methods, and aspirations.

Phoenix: Could you run through a quick sketch of services you plan to provide for the artists who join forces with Slop?

Slop: We’re offering suppliers of Fine contemporary expressions varying degrees of Fame and Fortune. Though sustained demand for their products will be more a function of the amplitude of their own love vibration, we’re offering each entrant a one (1) year product placement contract ensuring exposure of at least one (1) of their titles via at least one (1) of our award-winning print ads and on slopart.com in the year following submission. From that pool of entrants we’ll select gems to stock our brick and mortar Slop Brand Showroom Franchises, as seen in 13 cities, should any third party investors again muster adequate resources.

I understand that for some more-qualified participants you will make other more specialized services available.

For starters one (1) entrant will be chosen to be highlighted in the Solo Zone ^TM   of at least one (1) truck, ship, and/or train-borne Slop Brand Shippable Showroom ^TM  available for installation in a museum or mall parking lot near you. In the name of reducing audience apathy and alienation, we’ll be combing through the submissions for select expressions appropriate for distribution via our myriad compact and familiar Fine Art content delivery formats, including such mainstream audience favorites-to-be as Slop Brand Performance On Demand ^TM , Painting Simulator ^TM , Art*o*mat® READY ^TM , ArtFax ^TM , Downloadable Slop ^TM , Slop TV ^TM , Refrigerator Magnets, and Pocket Portfolios ^TM . Each is geared to help consumers more cleanly process the expressions themselves in the comfort of their home or office while combating storage dilemmas so often caused by a growing collection. Additional canonizing and public relations/branding services will be selectively bestowed.

Can you characterize your reception at the College Art Association annual conference last week?

We hate to brag, but after our session no less than 20 percent of the manufacturers in attendance applied for Slop Brand Career Assurance. Fine Art industrialists in attendance included Certified Masters, training specialists, and practitioners. We also spent time afterwards rubbing elbows and stroking the egos of industry analysts like yourself in an attempt to ensure favorable coverage in trade publications.

There is a fine line that your project traces between unapologetic free-market capitalism and serious searching for meaning, advocating the embrace of mastery and seeking to foster its pursuit and yet also undermining the system that trades on it. What criteria does Slop use to guide its activities in this fraught terrain?

Dear boy. How naive to think we might divulge such closely guarded trade secrets in such a public forum. But since you asked... Slop has come to place contradiction high on the list of ingredients required to make a lasting impression in the Fine Art Industry. Multiple studies have shown that ambiguity triggers more memorable experiences in captive primates than those that are predicted and resolved. But with the first deadline for rolling one-year contracts of December 31, 2006, fast approaching, it’s time to ramp up production, not mire ourselves in such non-productive navel gazing. (Some productive Navel Gazings(tm) can be viewed at www.slopart.com.) We at Slop recognize that everything needs fuel, something to burn, and parts of oneself often seem the ripest kindling.

Slop Art | For detailed submission form and identity badge as shown, send a SASE to Slop Brand Art, PO Box 10011, Portland, ME 04104

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On the Web:

Slop Art: www.slopart.com

College Art Association: www.college art.org

E-mail the author:

Chris Thompson: xxtopher@hotmail.com