A Very Queer Thing: a group exhibition curated by Jessi DiTillio

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

—Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities”

Okay, obviously Karl Marx didn’t mean a commodity was a very queer thing in that way, but words change, right? And often those changes have a certain kind of prescient magic. Marx introduced us to the idea that commodities take on a kind of cultish, spiritual magic by their very association with human effort and social relations. Per Karl, material objects’ sense of value, as commodities, comes not from anything inherent to their physical properties but to the ways they move between us, connect us and separate us, through the invisible relations between us they manifest. 

This exhibition is interested in commodity fetishism in a sideways sense from Marx’s meaning, a tender rotational pivot from economic theory to a queer erotics of objects. A Very Queer Thing presents eighteen artists from across North America who make objects as loci of human interaction and intimacy, objects that shape and are shaped by bodies, and of course, very queer things.