David Horvitz will mail you a picture of the sky for $10. Or if you give him $250, he will sit in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street and read The Little Prince. For $1000, he will buy as many copies of the Little Prince as possible, and give them away to employees leaving the stock exchange that evening. If you give him $2,443 he will rent a car in Iceland and find you three things. He will find you a lava rock and send it to you. He will find the Aurora Borealis for you and send you a photograph of it. He will find you the best hot spring, and he will sit in it for you. He will send you a photograph of him sitting in it.
When I first read his web page, I thought, what a scam. Who is this cheap bastard who wants you to send him to Iceland?
But then, I thought, this is a pretty interesting experiment that is only enabled today by the Internet. Only on the Internet do you have the audacity to ask people for these things. But then, because it's a form of media, this somehow becomes an act of participatory art. If you send him money, you are a part of this project.
One of his bestselling "ifs" involves him buying any meal up to $30 for a homeless person, if you give him $30. He's done this dozens of times now. In reality, what he's doing is simply expanding on something we already are used to: buying things online. But instead of a pair of slacks or a contribution to our friend's walkathon, we're buying a touch of whimsy, a hot meal for a person we'll never meet, or just a part of someone else's dream.
