99 Cent II Diptychon (9.3)

It is fitting that, at 3.34 million dollars, Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon is the most expensive photograph ever sold. The 6.79 by 11.06 foot work features seemingly unending rows of supermarket shelves, digitally altered to diminish perspective. As a result, the most distant products have collapsed back into the foreground, converting depth into dizzying height. The result is a grotesque carnival of color and detail, of overstocked super market aisles stacked into infinity. The 99 cent store has been violently compressed into a frenzy; each of the million of items screams out, brandishing its sharp, crisp figure and belligerent colors. In between the aisles, pressed between the insistent shelves like flowers between the pages of a hard-backed book, are lonely, flattened consumers, visually overwhelmed by the unrelenting amount of stuff.  Without the comforting haze of perspective the products shelved in the final rows are not smudged daubs of soft, radiant color but neon shrieks rendered with cruel precision. The viewer cannot ignore their presence, cannot escape the boundless, meaningless enumerations.The layers of aggressive products pile upwards in a capitalist race towards the ceiling where they are met, by yet another photograph of grocery store aisles robbed of depth. Together the two images present a towering accusation of excess, a visual ladder with rungs of glinting bottles, neon packages, crowded boxes, bright cans, and labeled cartons. The final impression, which is an aggressive and lonely tribute to the power of American consumerism, is well suited to its exorbitant price tag.