THE LAST UNSELLABLE ITEM

Le dernier article invendu / The Last Unsellable Item

Tomas Lagūnavičius

Carrefour Market, 67 Bd Saint-Marcel, 75013 Paris, France, 4 September 2026, 21:10

Tomas Lagūnavičius’s performance THE LAST UNSELLABLE ITEM (Le dernier article invendu / The Last Unsellable Item) took place on 4 September 2026 at 21:10 inside the retail space of a Carrefour Market supermarket in Paris. Rather than choosing a museum, gallery, or conventional performance venue, the artist chose a supermarket — a place where objects are constantly classified, priced, arranged, selected, and removed from circulation. This context becomes an essential material of the work.

At the core of the performance is a rhetorical question: “Isn’t a human being the same kind of commodity as the goods in a supermarket? If a commodity, what category would they belong to? And if not, what is a human being?”

At first glance, the question appears simple, yet it points toward one of the most fundamental problems of modern society — the relationship between the human being, the commodity, value, and the economic system.

In Karl Marx’s analysis in Capital, the commodity possesses both use-value and value forms; its value manifests itself through social relations and exchange. Marx also describes commodity fetishism — the process through which social relations between people come to appear as relations between things. Lagūnavičius’s performance reverses this theoretical perspective: if commodities become mediators of social relations, what happens to the human being when they themselves begin to be treated as an economic object?

The supermarket, in this context, becomes a kind of model of contemporary society. Here, every object has a category, a purpose, a price, and a place within the system. The artist’s question about the category of the human being therefore becomes an ontological provocation. If a human being were a commodity, where should they be placed? Among food? Services? Labour? Luxury goods? Or would an entirely separate shelf have to be created — “Human Being”?

Yet this is precisely where the paradox begins. A human being cannot be fully defined by their economic value. Human time can be sold as labour power, expertise can become a marketable service, the body can become an object of economic relations, and attention can become a resource within the consumer economy. Yet none of these functions exhausts the human being as a subject.

This problem can be further illuminated through the theory of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard argued that, within consumer society, commodities exist not merely because of their use-value or exchange-value — they also become signs that signify status, identity, lifestyle, and social position. Consumption thus becomes not simply the use of objects, but a system of signs.

This perspective radically expands Lagūnavičius’s question. Perhaps, in contemporary society, the human being is not simply a commodity. Perhaps they become a sign among other signs.

A human being can be a consumer, an employee, a client, a professional, a brand representative, an audience segment, or a statistical data unit. Their social identity is increasingly expressed through the objects they consume and the symbolic meanings attached to them. In Baudrillard’s analysis, consumer objects form a system in which social status and identity are articulated through differences between signs.

Therefore, THE LAST UNSELLABLE ITEM is not simply a critique of consumerism. It is a question about the boundary between subject and object.

What remains of the human being when their economic, social, and symbolic value is constantly being measured?

The title of the performance offers a paradoxical suggestion: the last unsellable item may not be an item at all. It may be the very human capacity to resist being fully transformed into an object.

From this perspective, the supermarket becomes not a place of commerce, but an ontological stage. The shelves become a system of classification, prices become a system of value, commodities become a system of signs, and the human being becomes a question that these systems can no longer definitively resolve. Lagūnavičius’s performance leaves the viewer not with an answer, but with an uncomfortable question:

If everything can be assigned a price, what is the last thing whose price cannot define it?

Perhaps that is the human being.