One thousand paintings

I recently discovered One thousand paintings, a project with the aim of selling 1000 paintings of the numbers 1 to 1000. The pricing model is quite interesting:

Generally, the value of a number is defined by the number itself, in the following way: value = 1000 – number. However, this is only the maximum price. Initially, a discount of 90% applies. This discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every hundred paintings that are sold (for example, after 300 sold paintings, the discount will be 60%)

I thought the whole thing was quite cool. Having showed it to my wife (who is herself an artist), we quickly started looking for numbers that were still available. Many of the likely choices had already gone (including my preference, 404) but she pointed out that 365 was still up for grabs (yes, yes.. we should have got 366 as well, for leap years). Before long, we’d ordered it, happy to support a cool project and wondering where we’d hang our unique 12″ x 12″ painting.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Million Dollar Homepage was taking off. Ian, while wondering whether gullibility was a pre-requisite for early adopter status, bought an ad for eightbar, which I notice still manages to bring us in over 30 clicks per month. While these are undeniably different projects, it’s hard not to compare them.

When Mrs Roo and I bought 365, it was the 98th painting sold (handily just within the maximum discount). Today, having been linked from boing boing and other prominent blogs, he’s already sold 144 225 and rising very fast. Surely mainstream media attention can’t be far behind.

9 thoughts on “One thousand paintings

  1. I’m hurridly trying to pick a 3 digit number that hasn’t gone.. will report back with my pick soon.. 🙂

  2. So gutted I threw all my old maths books away now, there were loads of numbers in there, I could have made a fortune…

  3. People may scoff (and indeed I probably did when the million dollar homepage was taking off) but his idea seems to be working. Over 400 paintings sold now, with over 200 of those being sold in the last 24 hours. I wonder if things will slow down as things approach the expensive end of 1000 paintings though? Coverage on Boing Boing was clearly a big help for him, but I suspect it might need to be picked up by Wired, BBC, etc to see it through to the end.

  4. It is really an interesting story, and one that shows that there still are new idea to be found and being the first one, or atleast the most popular one has some merit and adds to the richness of the world.
    As we are increasingly seeing things happen, solely based on a web buzz, bands get signed, singles get to the top of the charts, the million dollar home page etc. This is another fine example.

  5. Its great to have something so unique. I don’t think the Initial artist will do half as well. I wish the paintings were more visually appealing though. My birthday date is still available so thinking of buying it but I read on another site that theres some kind of DateArt being sold in Dublin that has a patterned background in black n’ white. Anyone know anything about it? Can’t find much info about it!!

Comments are closed.