It is curious to think about what a commission is and what is the potential of it in terms of the way you can develop your ideas.
With a commission, the artists can work where they want and they are not restricted to a gallery or museum when they are producing the piece, even if it is to be after exhibited in a place for art.
I think commission is the contemporary term for the old definition of Maecenas. 
Commission is the title of a film installation by the artist Erik van Lieshout that I had the pleasure to see in the Hayward Gallery Space at Southbank Centre. He received a public art commission by SIR (Sculpture International Rotterdam) to make a film.
For that, he chooses Zuidplein shopping mall in South Rotterdam, where he lived before.
This is a really ironical project with lots of humor that puts in question at the same time, the market value and the art value. But the artist told in an interview to BBC that this project was not an article or essay about fighting capitalism but it was more a future science fiction.
In my point of view he created a new conception of shop in the perfect place to do that and from there he could show the social and political issues of that area of the city through the shopping mall.
I'm very interested in this transformation of places into something that appears to be absurd to there.
There was a slogan on the shop front window saying: Real luxury is buying nothing. He says that people buy to fill up their emptiness. 
Was that a shop what he created? He was not selling anything there and when somebody wanted something he gave it to them. 
This remembered me a project I did in 2007 called Galeria Ambulante (Mobile gallery). It was my personal art gallery. I was walking with an old ice-cream car in a street with lots of art galleries. The car was full of ice-cream drawings I did on paper and I was giving the ice-cream drawings to people in the street. I wanted to put in question the value of art when it is inside and outside the gallery. And here you can ask: Its not art until its sold?
Lieshout put the same question in this project.
People suppose that its a shop, because he is in a shop context. It was expected to be a shop in that place. And this is amazing how people have pre-defined notions about how things should be organized or structured based on logic.
Van Lieshout is creating a kind of disturbance in the shopping, he is changing the rules there, and he is creating the unexpected, subverting the common logic of a shop not only to receive opinions from people about what he is doing but also to show us the reality in South Rotterdam.
This project is also about doing art out of its context. Thats because Lieshout says that he was an outsider there. He said: They dont understand the shop, they are laughing at me. I feel Im put on the sideline as an artist.
I had the same experience doing art work in public space. If you put art out of its ideal context, it appears to be very absurd. But I love this absurdity because it means transformation.
It is amazing to do art in a place where there is no art and no audience because you are surprised all the time with some comments, reactions and thoughts. It is about getting feedback from people that has a completely different mind and perception of things.
What normally happens in that case is that people think you are crazy. But if you say that you are an artist then its great excuse to them. They can still dont understand you, but sometimes they respect you more, mainly when you are receiving money or support from some institution to do your work.
Lieshout said that he created a crazy abstract shop: Nobody expects to find it there. People are staring inside the whole day: what is this? A flower shop? A sex shop? An art shop?
Actually theres no definition for what he did. What he did was interventional philosophy and the creation of an utopia. 
Van Lieshout said in his video: I think sometimes its to much art. But art is cool! People ask me what is it and I have to say: art.
When I was living in Berlin I felt the same. Theres art everywhere and in different locations. Sometimes you get lost and you cant define what is art and what is not. And you put in question the definition of art and the limits of the art territory, but I think this is a good thing. Artists should put everything in question all the time.
One of the persons that entered in Lieshout shop said something like this: when you change things it has a negative impact on people. The shops obey always to the same formula, the ideal structure. That's a market and business rule.
People like to stay comfortable and thinking is an uncomfortable thing. When you change something you are making people think and in the market world its preferable if people dont think too much and just get the impulse to buy. Shop windows in shopping malls are all organized in the same logic of harmony. Its a commercial principle. And Lieshout is subverting that logic.Erik Van Lieshout said that Commission is 'my commentary on the socio-political powerlessness of people and of art. It is also my quest for a home'.