View Basket

A range of images and objects have been selected by Hayward Curatorial Associate Tom Morton and purchased from the auction site eBay.co.uk, with a limited budget of 5,000, over a ten-day period in August 2008.

The chosen pieces will reflect Britain's 'hidden' art - works that have occupied people's homes rather than the public space of a gallery, offered for sale through the democratic marketplace of the internet.

View Basket comprises everything from amateur paintings to original comic art, from customised action figures to ephemera. Works include a bust of Freddie Mercury's made out of Lego and a Damien Hirst limited edition copy of Snowblind. The Hayward Project Space will be filled with an ever-expanding selection of works as new items arrive at the gallery during the run of the exhibition, reflecting the project's open-ended nature. It also includes a display of the improvised and sometimes highly idiosyncratic packaging in which these items have been sent to The Hayward. At the end of the exhibition the works will become part of The Hayward's archive.

Emphasising works by amateur, obscure and even anonymous artists, View Basket is in part an exhibition of 'thrift store' or 'folk' art, in the tradition of ongoing projects by artists Jim Shaw and Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane. However it also seeks to explore questions of how art is circulated, and how the provenance of a work impacts on its perceived cultural value.