Imaginary Economics

Olav Velthuis

Imaginary
Economics
Contemporar y Ar tists
and the World of Big Money

NAi Publishers

When I hear

Contents

the word culture

Introduction

9
19

Substituting one
abstraction for another

41

Hostile Spheres

81

Good Business is
the Best Ar t

91

The Culturalization
of Economics

105

A Theor y of Play

127

Conclusion

133
137
142

Notes
Literature
Exhibitions

I take out my

checkbook
Jean-Luc Godards citaat op collage van Barbera Kruger
uit de film Le Mpris, 1963

John Freyer, All My Life for Sale, 2000 John D Freyer 2001-2002

John Freyer, All My Life for Sale, 2000 John D Freyer 2001-2002

Introduction

1,2

Anyone who happened to be looking for an old issue of

National Geographic on the internet auction site eBay in
2001 risked becoming par t of a project conceived by the
American ar tist John Freyer. During that year Freyer
sold all of his belongings via eBay; it was generally not
until the invoice was sent that a buyer was informed
of having contributed to the ar tists dispossession. Each
object put up for sale was described by Freyer in terms
of its origins and personal significance. Many of the
belongings that he sold were, like the issue of National
Geographic, scarcely wor thy of mention a thermos,
a belt with a buckle that reads Its a strike, or a
nightlight in the form of a Jesus figure. But also
personal, intimate or memor y-laden objects and gifts
were put up for sale. The museum of the University of
Iowa, where Freyer studied, bought the teeth that he had
as a child. For $1.25 a New Yorker was allowed to take
Freyers place at a bir thday par ty that friends had
organized for him in a New York bar. The new Freyer
announced in The New York Times that he was extremely

happy with his purchase; since the par ty, he himself was
spending time with the old Freyers friends. 1 A perusal
of the list with objects that Freyer sold therefore provides

10

3

not only an impression of his life and personality, but

also leads to the question of what remained of him at
the conclusion of the project. No possessions, no
identity?
In the contemporar y ar t world, with its insatiable
appetite for the new and the dif ferent as well as
its levelling capacity to accomodate many diverse, often
contradictor y developments at the same time, it may
be unwise to speak of movements or trends. Nevertheless it is striking to see just how many ar tists are
concerned, like Freyer, with ordinar y economic
phenomena such as markets, money, consumption or
the possession of proper ty. The old dictum that ar t and
economics are incompatible is gradually losing its
validity. Tensions between the two realms, if any, seem
to be a source of inspiration rather than an obstacle to
contemporar y ar tists.
To provide an example: the ar tists initiative Etoy
pokes fun at the online toy retailer Etoys, one of the
internet companies whose market value exploded at the
end of the nineties and imploded just as quickly when
the internet hype suddenly appeared to be over. Etoy
developed its own corporate culture, including a
business plan, shares, and a board of commissioners;
the toywar which was subsequently waged against the
toy retailer Etoys, the domain name of Etoys own
website being at stake, led to a long and drawn-out
lawsuit.
A poetic representation of the economy can be seen
with the Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, an
internet ar twork made by Lise Autogena and Joshua
Por tway for the website of Britains Tate Galler y. The title
of the work mocks two economists, Fischer Black and
Myron Scholes, who won the Nobel Prize for a
mathematical model by which the fluctuations of shares
and options on the stock market could be predicted to a
cer tain extent. In the vir tual planetarium of Autogena
and Por tway, the stars consist of businesses on the
stock exchange. The information broker Reuters
furnished the ar tists with ongoing stock information for
the planetarium. The bustle of financial markets gives

11
3
Lise Autogena and Joshua Por tway, Black Shoals Stock Market
Planetarium, detail (Tobacco Constellation), 2001-2004. Cour tesy Lise
Autogena and Por tway

way, in the planetarium, to a dreamlike quality, to a

universe which, oddly enough, is free of financial
worries. At a later stage, the planetarium was also
projected on the dome-shaped ceiling of a dark room.
Various Dutch ar tists have also made contributions
to this flourishing interest in the economy. For many
years now Joep van Lieshouts multidisciplinar y
company Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) has been producing
not only autonomous works of ar t, but also practical
polyester objects such as furniture, kitchens and
caravans. Throughout this production process, which is
housed in Van Lieshouts autarkic free state in
Rotterdam, design and anti-design, commerce and
anarchy, a communal spirit and individuality are jumbled
together. For a project commissioned by the Sociale
Verzekeringsbank (SVB) Mar tijn Sandberg had 1,020
coins with the text we are all in it for the money cast by
the Koninklijke Munt (Royal Mint of the Netherlands).
Sandberg embedded these coins in the floor of a new
office building of the SVB in order to remind employees

of the ambivalent motives underlying human behavior.

Or take Hester Oerlemans, who wanted to make a fresh
star t after her solo exhibition at Arnhems Museum voor
Moderne Kunst in the spring of 2002. That is why she
decided to auction of f all of the exhibited works as a
final per formance. By doing this Oerlemans transformed
the museum into a commercial display center and the
auction into an ar t project. 2

No illustration

12

This essay is about contemporar y ar t as a source of

knowledge per taining to the economy. Confrontations
between ar t and the economy that are frequently the
focus of public attention, such as the workings of the ar t
market, the astronomical sums of money paid for works
of ar t at auction, the income situation of ar tists or the
reasons why the government should or should not
subsidize ar t, will remain unconsidered in this essay.
I shall concentrate on the non-verbal, visual or poetic
means by which contemporar y ar tists reflect on a range
of economic issues or by which they comment on,
investigate, define and criticize the meaning of economic
concepts and processes. Fur thermore, I shall be looking
at ar tists who do not limit themselves to reflection
but design their own alternative economies, complete
with new money (chapter one).
This ar t constitutes an alternative to the knowledge,
information and ideas about the economy that are
presented to us by journalists and so-called exper ts who
have backgrounds in business or academia. That is why
I speak of imaginar y economics. That term should not be
interpreted as an attempt to identify new tendencies in
ar t, but as a designation for a form of economic knowledge that is generally not recognized as such. I question
the fixed idea that economists are the only people who
know about these matters: anyone who wishes to
understand how the economy functions and what ef fect
it has on ever yday life should turn to contemporar y ar t.
As a form of knowledge, imaginar y economics
cer tainly has its shor tcomings. It is hardly systematic
and seems to be much more subjective than, for
instance, scientific knowledge about the economy. Due

13

to its predominantly non-verbal character, it is scarcely

able to convey detailed concepts or to arrive at
unambiguous statements about economic processes. A
master narrative such as that presented by Adam Smith,
John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman or other
resounding names in the histor y of economic thought
will therefore not be found within the realm of imaginar y
economics. This makes one ver y inclined to regard
imaginar y economics as a mere derivative, an
illustration that accompanies some existing economic
thought and not as a source of knowledge in itself.
Another shor tcoming is that imaginar y economics,
as a form of knowledge, does not spread circulate
easily, despite the many attempts of ar tists to reach a
broader audience. It circulates primarily within the ar t
world and is therefore dependent on visitors to
exhibitions, attention from the media or a coincidental
confrontation in public space. In other words, it lags
behind the economic repor ting that we see ever y day in
newspapers as well as the talking heads, often of
neoliberal persuasion, who make themselves heard in
the media with considerable frequency.
Never theless I argue that imaginar y economics has the
right to exist not only as a form of ar t, but also as a
source of knowledge. The knowledge generated by
imaginar y economics is that of an essayist, not that of
an analyst. Because of its non-academic character, its
ties to ever yday economic life are closer than those of
economic science and its frequently abstract,
quantitative and less-than-human insights. Imaginar y
economics goes beyond obser vation and description. It
sooner opts for a strategy of imitation, simulation,
magnification and parody. Moreover, the visual character
of imaginar y economics may be a weakness, but it is
also a strength. For instance, with his internet auction
Freyer does something that economists cannot match:
he shows something through the experience of it. Freyer
speaks to the imagination, provokes and sets one
thinking about a society in which anything, if desired,
can be transformed into merchandise by a few clicks of
the mouse. Imaginar y economics is, in other words, not
concerned with the passive transfer of preexistent, bitesized bits of economic insight.

14

Homogeneity or consensus is nowhere to be found in

imaginar y economics: surely it is heterodox and
comprises a greater wealth of ideas than the canon of
neoliberal economics. Nonetheless, in this essay I
distinguish three forms of imaginar y economics, based
on the way in which contemporar y ar tists represent the
economy and in some cases its relationship to ar t. In
the first place, imaginar y economics gives rise to a
current of critical ideas on processes or elements within
the (ar t) economy, such as exploitation, alienation and
the impor tance of power structures. This form of
imaginar y economics has its roots in the 1970s. It
presupposes that the domain of economics invades an
increasing number of other domains, including that of
ar t, which results in contamination. Here, the
presumption is that the qualitative logic of the ar ts and
the quantitative logic of the economy are incompatible
(chapter two).
During the 1980s, when the ar t market was
booming, a second form of imaginar y economics came
into fashion, one which did not criticize but rather
endorsed the economy. American makers of commodity
sculpture (e.g. Jef f Koons, Haim Steinbach) and Dutch
ar tists such as Rob Scholte or Hugo Kaagman suggested
in their work that the logic of the ar ts and that of the
economy were not incompatible but, in fact, consistent
with each other. The dif ference between ar tist and homo
economicus, between ar tworks and consumer goods,
between the ar t world and the financial market becomes
less distinct here (chapter three). During the second half
of the nineties another variant of this affirmative
imaginar y economics began to emerge, one which took
its inspiration from an alleged cultural upheaval within
the economy: the economy was supposedly not
incompatible with qualitative processes, with immaterial
values or with creativity but, on the contrar y, thrived
under these. Ar tists initiatives (The initiatives of
ar tists?) such as Swetlana Heger, Plamen Dejanov and
the Dutch Orgacom make that cultural upheaval visible.
They show that economy and ar t are compatible with
each other, not because the ar t world is becoming more
commercial, but because the economy is becoming
more cultural. (chapter four).

No matter how common this dichotomy between criticism

and affirmation may have become in ar t criticism, it is
arbitrar y insofar as ever y form of imaginar y economics
ultimately allows for both interpretations at the same
time. Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, two ar tists who
repeatedly and emphatically related to the economy in
their work, are depicted, in an over whelming amount of
literature on their work, as charlatans who sought easy
success and embraced commerce. Others, however, see
them as admirable critics who succeeded in exposing
the commercial status of ar t in our society. The work of

15

Sylvia Fleur y, which I discuss in chapter two, is ostensibly

critical about the capitalistic fetishism of goods, yet
the ar tist herself dismisses this interpretation by saying
that she is merely fascinated with todays flashy
consumer culture. Conversely, Swetlana Heger seems to
sell out completely to big business, and yet she makes a
claim to a critical position within the ar t/economic
system.
Let us return once more to Freyers internet
business. On the one hand, in an almost paternalistic
way, his business provokes critical questions regarding
the economys infiltration of the personal domain.
Freyer suggests that identity is defined by possessions
to an increasing degree and that the internet, initially a
democratic medium prompting utopian ideas, has
deteriorated into a commercial wasteland where even the
most intimate goods can be traded anonymously.
During the same year in which Freyer was selling all of
his belongings via eBay, an American couple, Frances
Schroeder and Jason Black, were selling the name of
their yet unborn child on the internet. The highest bidder
would be allowed to determine that name if so desired,
a brand name such as Coca-Cola or Nike. The opening
minimum bid of a half million dollars failed to materialize
however. A year later Kay Hammond, an internet
entrepreneur from Birmingham (GB), sold her marriageability by way of an internet auction. She would tie the
knot with the highest bidder, on the condition that this
person met a number of basic conditions such as having
no criminal record. The reason for doing this, as stated
in the British press, was that Hammond herself was
too busy to find a par tner. The British ar tist Gareth
Malham commented, like Freyer, on these inimate

transactions by putting his ver y soul up for sale on eBay.

This was purchased for 11.61.
On the other hand, one can maintain that Freyers
project is not critical but, in fact, affirmative. The ar tist
cleverly used the internet as a sales channel and
moreover acquired a competitive advantage with respect
to other eBay vendors by defining his wares as ar t: once
people became aware that this was real ar t by a real
ar tist, Freyer managed to sell his belongings easily. A

16

4

number of items, secondhand, sold for prices higher than

their new value in the store. They had become collectors
items.
The project also yielded another, perhaps much more
substantial profit for Freyer: with the internet sale his
reputation in the ar t world was established in one fell
swoop. For the project brought the ar tist a considerable
amount of attention from the media and cultural
institutions, as well as a handsomely published catalogue
that documents the project. In exchange for his personal
possessions Freyer received, in other words, not only
economic capital but also symbolic capital of at least
equal value.
The fact that a work evokes conflicting interpretations is not incidental but symptomatic of imaginar y
economics, since the distance between two positions
that were once radically opposed criticism versus
affirmation seems momentarily to be reduced to a
minimum. The dichotomous terms in which ar t criticisms
interpretations have traditionally represented the
relationship between ar t and economics are, to put it
dif ferently, worn out. Why? First of all, because the
market assimilates criticism directed against it more
ef for tlessly and rapidly than ever before. Think, for
instance, of the multinationals, only too glad to sit down
with anti-globalists, environmental groups or humanrights organizations and adjust their business strategy
accordingly. Or think of the many ar tists who denounce
the ar t market in their work and yet see that work
yield ten thousand dollars on the same ar t market. The
market cer tainly knows how to deal with criticism!
A second reason for the collapse of the dichotomy
between criticism and affirmation is that many ar tists
situate their work inside, not outside, the economic
system which they are criticizing. Christoph Bchel, for

17
4
Christoph Bchel, Invite Yourself, (Manifesta 4 Par ticipation),
2002. Cour tesy Christoph Bchel

example, sold his right to par ticipate in the Manifesta

exhibition in Frankfur t (2002) and thereby questioned
the gatekeeping role of curators in the ar t world.
Bchels criticism replaces, as it were, the elitism of the
ar t world with the supposed democracy of the market.
Ar tists are, for that matter, not the only ones who wish
to adopt critical stances within the dominant economic
system. Image brokers such as Oliviero Toscani,
the former designer of Bennetons controversial ad
campaigns, are also entering into the commercial
domain, because they believe that comments on social
phenomena are circulated most broadly there and are
done justice by it. As a result of this, the target and
the instrument of criticism what is being criticized and
what means are used to achieve this are no longer
clearly distinguishable.
What does it mean when the dichotomy of criticism
versus affirmation, which has dominated and structured
many interpretations of the relationship between ar t and
economics for quite some time, no longer functions?

In my view it need not lead to the tentative discourse by

which the humanities are plagued at the moment and
which deems all interpretations to be temporar y,
contingent and unstable. Endeavors to arrive at a
dif ferent way of thinking about economics and ar t can be
found in a third form of imaginar y economics, which
eludes the criticism/affirmation dichotomy and
represents economics as play (chapter five). Ar tists and
ar tists initiatives such as Etoy, Matthieu Laurette or
Nobumichi Tosa take rules that apply implicitly in the
economy and make them explicit, imitate them and
magnify them. The parody that comes about in this way
has a refreshing lightness; it ef fectively undermines the
prominence of the economy in our society.

18

Substituting
one abstraction
for another

5

It can be asser ted that ever y ar twork allows itself to be

interpreted in terms of economic meaning. If ar t
historians can provide a psychoanalytic or sociological
interpretation of ar t that initially seems to have little to
do with the psyche or with social relationships, why
not an economic one? Many examples of such economic
readings already exist. They show how the economic
context in which ar t was and is produced, distributed and
consumed becomes par t of the works themselves. The
ar t historian Michael Baxandall has demonstrated, for
instance, that the way in which painters were rewarded
during the Italian Renaissance directly influenced the
execution of the painting. Patrons of ar t paid for each
depiction of an individual and for the amount of pigment
used. The most expensive pigment that existed at that
time, lapis-lazuli blue, thereby became a symbol of
distinction. That is why the Virgin Mar y can be identified
in paintings from this time by way of the color of her
gown. Or take the American economist Michael Montias,
who argued that the unexpected prosperity which came

20

5
Piero della Francesca, The Nativity, detail, ca. 1470-1475.
National Galler y, London

to Holland during the Golden Age can be traced through

the ar t of that period. That prosperity caused the
demand for ar t to increase explosively and prompted the
Dutch ar tist to produce works more rapidly. This, in turn,
was accompanied by changes of style. The transition in
the work of Jan van Goyen, from a traditional and
detailed rendering of landscapes to simple compositions
and nonchalant, quick brushstrokes, is consequently
ascribed by Montias to economic factors. 3
Where modern ar t is concerned, predominantly
Mar xist ar t historians have contended that it should be
interpreted as an ongoing and structural critique of
capitalism. Futurist or cubist works supposedly represent,
for instance, the fragmentation, disruption, alienation
and anonymity that has become characteristic of modern
capitalist society. 4 Other ar tists and ar t critics identified
abstract ar t, during the first half of the twentieth centur y,
with anti-capitalist and with anti-utilitarian values. In
ber das Geistige in der Kunst (1912), for example,
Wassily Kandinsky associated realism with materialism
and abstraction with the spiritual. The inward tone that
is generated by the forms and colors of abstract ar t
would, in Kandinskys view, raise the world to a higher,
more spiritual level. Nowadays, ironically enough, the
same abstract ar t evokes a materialist response among
those less acquainted with it. People ask why an
abstract painting is wor th so much money (my kid can
do that too) and thereby question the quality and
quantity of labor yielded by the ar tist. The astronomical
prices now being paid for abstract ar t, such as the eighty
million guilders for Mondrians Victor y Boogie Woogie,
only boost that materialist response. For those critical of
contemporar y ar t these prices symbolize the af fectation,
the elitist character and the lacking sense of reality of
the ar t world.5
Within an undercurrent of the histor y of ar t, the
economy manifests itself even more explicitly. Moneychangers were, for instance, a popular iconographic
theme in sixteenth-centur y Dutch painting. During the
nineteenth centur y Victorian ar tists made paintings in
veneration of diligent labor. Factor y-like, labor-free
processes were a frequent subject of early twentiethcentur y modernism, and presently the diverse locations
at which economic life takes place (financial markets,


6,7,8

22

supermarkets, office spaces) are extensively documented

in the work of ar t photographers such as Andreas
Gursky, Roy Arden and Thomas Demand. Or look at the
post-industrial iconography in work by ar tists such as
Gunilla Klingberg, who remodels supermarket logos (e.g.
Seven-Eleven, Spar) into kaleidoscopic, repetitive and
vir tually psychedelic videos; or at Andreas Pflumm, who
deconstructs similar types of logos and incorporates
their visual elements into abstract, monotonous video
loops.
What I mean by imaginar y economics is not identical,
however, to such diverse forms of economic iconography,
if only because the work of many (e.g. conceptual)
ar tists cannot be said, strictly speaking, to involve any
iconography at all. What matters is that the ar tists whom
I discuss do more and sometimes less than produce
depictions of the economy. They investigate and
question economic processes with a range of means and
comment on them. In doing so they produce not only
images of, but also knowledge on the economy. The
degree to which this distinction between economic
iconography and imaginar y economics is tenable should
become evident in the course of this essay.

Beyond kitsch
Among the ar tists who were concerned with imaginar y
economics are established names from the histor y
of twentieth-centur y ar t Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein,
Piero Manzoni, Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys,
to name a few though they are generally not
represented with their best-known work. These pioneers
knew that they would cause friction, for imaginar y
economics went against the spirit of the age for a long
time. Consciously or unconsciously they resisted not
only the arrogance of academic economists, who claim
to have a monopoly on the production of economic
insights. These ar tists also opposed the elitism of fellow
ar tists, ar t historians and ar t critics, who wished
categorically to separate ar t and economics and believed
that any economic inter ference had to be prevented in
order to safeguard the autonomy of ar t. According to one
of the best-known critics of the twentieth centur y, the

23
6
Gunilla Klingberg, Sparloop (video projection), 2000-2004.
Photograph: Peter Geschwind. Cour tesy Gunilla Klingberg and Galler y
Nordenhake

American Clement Greenberg, the rise of modernism

could be regarded as an emigration of ar t from bourgeois
society and the markets of capitalism. Should ar t fail
to achieve this emigration, then it will be reduced to
kitsch, Greenberg concluded in his essay Avant-garde
and Kitsch (1939). This dichotomy set the tone for most
of the twentieth centur y: that which constitutes ar t
can have nothing to do with economics, and that which
constitutes economics, has nothing to do with ar t. 6
Imaginar y economics takes little notice of this
categorical division. In fact, I imagine that Duchamp,
Klein, Manzoni, Broodthaers and Beuys gladly
abandoned the familiar domain of ar t in order to
venture into the forbidden domain of economics.
The current blossoming of imaginar y economics indicates
that this categorical division of the two domains has
eroded since then. That can be attributed primarily to the
changing relationship between ar t and society throughout
recent decades. The division between high, elitist and

24
7
Gunilla Klingberg, Sparspace (detail), c-print, 1999-2000.
Cour tesy Gunilla Klingberg and Galler y Nordenhake

8
Gunilla Klingberg, Sparloop (video still), 2000. Cour tesy Gunilla
Klingberg and Galler y Nordenhake

low, popular ar t has been questioned to an increasing

extent. From the consumption point of view, there was
the emergence of the cultural omnivore, the consumer
who goes to both Hollywood films and ar t films,
alternates pop music with classical music and gets as
much enjoyment from visiting a museum as from
watching music videos. From the production point of
view, ar tists have been borrowing from low ar t for their
visual language ever since Pop Ar t. 7 Seeing that the

25

division between high and low ar t has, in the past, been

defined in economic terms that is to say, low ar t as a
commercial form of ar t and high ar t as an anti-commercial
one the blurring of that division of fers ar tists the
potential to relate to the market in other terms than
merely the denial or rejection of it. In Greenbergs terms,
it allows ar tists to operate within the markets of
capitalism without risking the degradation of their ar t to
kitsch.
A second development, linked to the first, is that
ar tists have begun to take a more reflective stance
toward the role which they play in society. They are
interested in absolute autonomy to a lesser degree than
before, less interested in an inwardly directed discourse
on ar t or an ongoing investigation of the inherent
qualities of the media (painting, sculpture) with which
they work. Instead it seems that an increasing number of
ar tists wish to play a significant role beyond the ar t
world as well; a pronounced concern for economic af fairs
is thereby no longer inconceivable. Many forms of
imaginar y economics consequently come to resemble
what Beuys once referred to as social sculpture:
interdisciplinar y, par ticipative and, where possible,
democratic endeavors which take little notice of where
the ar t world begins and where it ends. The absurdity
of financial/economic developments from the internet
bubble to the crisis in Asia and Argentina and the
uneasy feeling that more and more societal domains are
being dictated by the market provide a wealth of material
for social sculpture right now.
A third development that has led to a concern for the
economy relates to the development of modern ar t
itself: the end of paintings supremacy as a medium and
the rise, from the sixties onward, of a variety of new
media ranging from video and installations to internet

26

ar t and per formances. These new media of fer ar tists

more degrees of freedom for making claims about
economic life. It should therefore not come as a surprise
that painting is underrepresented within imaginar y
economics. A four th relevant development is the
economization of the ar ts: especially during the 1980s,
the ar ts were increasingly transformed into a sector of
the economy. This meant that ar tworks came to be seen
as investment products, ar t buyers as speculators
and ar tists as superstars whose reputation is reflected
in the price of their work. This economization of the
ar t world was boosted by neoliberal government policy:
Thatcherism and Reaganomics during the 1980s, as well
as the Third Way of European social-democracy during
the 1990s. As a result, such terms as efficiency,
ar t marketing and fund-raising came to dominate the ar t
world and made it possible to conceive of relationships
between the ar tist, the ar twork and the public in
economic terms.
A final development that has paved the way to
imaginar y economics is the changing structure of the
economy itself. During the second half of the twentieth
centur y, a postmodern economy allegedly emerged,
the character of which dif fers fundamentally from the
modern, industrial economy. The new economy would
thrive on cultural, qualitative or creative processes,
on attention and inspiration, image and identity. It is not
the physical captial, but rather the intellectual, cultural
or symbolic capital of a business that determines
success in this postmodern economy. The economization
of the ar t world had found its rival, in other words, in
the culturalization of the economy. In this new cultural
economy, ar tists could play an impor tant role.

Money Ar t
Together, all of these developments contributed to a
gradual rise of ar tists concerned with the economy
in recent decades. Undoubtedly, money has always been
a popular theme. Ever since paper currency was being
circulated on a large scale, ar tists have represented
money in all sor ts of ways. American painters such as
William Harnett and John Haberle produced ver y popular

27
9
Andy Warhol, 192 One-Dollar Bills, 1962 Andy Warhol, c/o
Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2004

9

trompe loeil paintings of dollar bills at the end of the

nineteenth centur y. This gave Harnett some trouble with
the authorities, who accused him of couter feiting. A half
centur y later Otis Kaye, another American trompe
loeil painter, produced a copy of a Rembrandt etching
on which he also depicted three coins. Two of these,
including the tape by which they seemed to be attached
to the painting, were trompe-loeil depictions; the third
was a real coin.
A new wave of money ar t followed during the 1960s.
In an ar ticle titled Paper money made into ar t you can
bank on a journalist for Life Magazine remarked, Money
is generating a new kind of interest in the ar t world.
Always glad to make money out of ar t, some enterprising
ar tists are now tr ying to make ar t out of money. In
those days Andy Warhol was producing his first screen
prints of series of dollar bills, which suggested that
money could also be seen as an ar twork, albeit one in a
large edition. Rober t Watts copied 2,500 one-dollar bills
and made a wooden trunk for the storage of these bills.

28

10

Atelier Van Lieshout, AVL geld, 2001. Cour tesy Atelier Van Lieshout

30
11 Ray Beldner, This is Definitely Not a Pipe, 2000 (after Rene
Magrittes The reason of Images, 1929). Sewn dollar bills. Cour tesy
Ray Beldner and Catharina Clark Galler y, San Francisco

11

The ar tist Dorothy Greubenak wove a big carpet of

two-dollar bills. And like Harnett, they subsequently had
dealings with the authorities; the Federal Bureau of
Investigation became suspicious and confiscated the
carpet.
In the decades to come, some ar tists modified
actual paper currency and transformed it into ar twork,
while others manufactured their own notes or even their
own monetar y unit. To name just a few: Stephen Barnwell
makes poetic Dream Dollars, which are the currency
of an imaginar y colony in Antarctica called Nadiria; the
American ar tist Ray Beldner folds dollar bills and then
assembles them into copies of modern ar tworks such as
Duchamps Urinoir, Mondrians Composition (B) in Blue,
Yellow and White and Ren Magrittes Ceci nest pas une
pipe; in 1987 the Swiss ar tist Silvan Baer produced, at
the Swiss airpor t Kloten, perhaps the largest bank note
ever to exist in the tradition of money ar t. With the aid of
about six thousand little flags, he marked out a bank
note of 1,000 francs measuring 78 by 175 meters. The


10

31

12,13

ar tist called it a monument to money as the most

impor tant motive for thought and action in present-day
society.
Veterans of the Dutch ar t world have also made
contributions to money ar t. Together with graffiti ar tist
Hugo Kaagman, Aad Veldhoen painted bank notes on his
house in Amsterdam. Jan Wolkers produced a sculpture
of ten thousand ten-guilder notes at the request of
currency printer Joh. Ensched, which then presented it
to De Nederlandsche Bank (the Dutch central bank) as a
gift. Zero ar tist Jan Henderikse folded cute T-shir ts of
German marks and American dollars and created a coat
of bank notes. Joep van Lieshout produced his own bank
notes, which were meant to function as legitimate
currency in his Rotterdam free state AVL; due to the high
cost of printing, the notes were ultimately not put into
circulation. During the early nineties, the Amsterdam trio
of ar tists behind the name Seymour Likely produced 500
twenty-five guilder notes, each furnished with a stamp
and an edition number and accompanied by a
mystification of fensive which was once their trademark. 8
Some ar tists, such as Meschac Gaba or in the past
Rober t Rauschenberg, do not focus on the modification
or creation of money but use it, rather, as material which
they incorporate into their canvases or sculptures.
Others deploy money as a vehicle for communication in
order to reach a wider audience. The American ar tist
David Greg Har th, for instance, places stamps on dollar
bills and then puts them into circulation: I am not
terrorized, could be read on a bank note by several
hundred thousand Americans after September 11, 2001.
With their Subnote project the Dutch ar tists Paul
Steenberghe and Betty Ras attempted to recover the
bank note from the economy, in order to use it as a kind
of public space. For this they placed poetic texts and
symbols on the bank notes and invited other ar tists to
do the same. By making use of ink that can only be seen
in daylight, Steenberghe and Ras endeavored literally to
draw bank notes into public space.
Mail-ar t ar tists use money, on the other hand, for
more intimate forms of communication. Since the sixties
they have been designing their own bank notes. In
contrast to real money, their small collages generally
have a frivolous and color ful appearance. These notes

32
12
13

David Greg Har th, I am not a dollar, 2000 David Greg Har th 2004
David Greg Har th, I am not terrorized, 2001 David Greg Har th 2004

are rarely exhibited. Instead, their makers send them to

each other by mail in exchange for notes received. The
notes therefore have a local, even relation-specific value
rather than one of universal exchange. By poking fun at
official institutions such as money, these ar tists uphold,
on a modest scale, a Fluxus tradition from the sixties. 9
The continuing interest that ar tists have for money
could (overlooking the obvious material reasons) be
explained by pointing out a number of structural analogies
between ar t and money. Both are symbolic systems.
Their value is not inherent but is a social construction:
all sor ts of social conventions and institutions
(museums and banks respectively) provide the basis for
their meaning and give both ar t and money legitimacy
and value. Without faith in a piece of printed paper, no
exchange will take place. Without any notion of ar tistic
conventions, ar t will not come into being. Ultimately,
both ar t and money are abstractions. As the ar tist
Daniel Spoerri once said, In exchanging ar t for money,
we exchange one abstraction for another.

33
14 Maria Eichhorn, Public Limited Company (safe), 2002
(Dokumenta 11). Cour tesy Galerie Barbara Weiss

15 Maria Eichhorn, Public Limited Company (district cour t), 2002

(Dokumenta 11). Cour tesy Galerie Barbara Weiss

34

14,15

That abstract quality may also explain why conceptual

ar tists are so well represented within imaginar y
economics. Consider the work Profit Systems One by Les
Levine. On March 27, 1969 he purchased 500 shares in
the Cassette Car tridge Corporation for $4.75 per
share. After precisely one year or as early as a profitmaking oppor tunity could arise Levine would sell the
shares again. In a press release he wrote: The profit or
loss of the transaction will become the work of ar t.
In a similar way the Munich ar tists collective Szuper
Galler y used a donation of 5,000 in 1999 to speculate
in on-line day trading from an office in Londons ICA
galler y. That is to say that ever y morning they took
position by purchasing financial instruments (shares,
options or derivatives) and had to succeed in getting rid
of these positions again preferably with profit, of
course before the market closed at the end of the day.
One of their spokesmen said the following about the
project: Financial people always like to see trading as
an ar t; we are going to investigate how true that is.10
Maria Eichhorns much-discussed contribution to
documenta XI (2002) falls into the same categor y. With
the production budget that she was given for her
par ticipation at Kassel, she founded the company Maria
Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft. The ar tist herself, acting as
Chief Executive Officer, made documenta organizer
Okwui Enwezor chairman of the board. When founding
the company, the ar tist had inser ted a clause which ruled
out the possibility of profit. That proved to be no
problem, since the company existed only on paper and
produced absolutely nothing.
z of ar tists and has always managed to do so is that
the social character of money keeps on changing. Until
the nineteenth centur y, and in some countries even until
the star t of the twentieth centur y, a hodgepodge of
dif ferent coins and bank notes was in circulation. In the
United States, for example, the present-day dollar was
not standardized until 1928; before that, almost any bank
could publish its own bank notes. Central banks were
founded in many countries during the nineteenth centur y;
these had to super vise the circulation of money and
create order in the confused monetar y traffic of that
time. The uniformity of money as a means of exchange
began to increase rapidly around the turn of the centur y,

35

16,17

while the printing of money became monopolized by the

state.
On the one hand, that uniformity of money is only
being reinforced by recent developments. Due to
the introduction of the euro, for instance, at least eleven
dif ferent currencies vanished all at once. An increasing
use of credit cards and payment by PIN code mean that
money is appearing in its material form of notes and
coins less frequently: with the thousands of billions that
change hands on international money markets ever y
day, money can be perceived only in the form of shifting
digits on computer screens.
On the other, a widespread and diverse resistance
to this increasingly prevalent standardization of
monetar y traffic is beginning to take shape. Just look at
the republics that have come into being due to the
disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Balkan crisis:
they tried to introduce, as soon as possible, a national
currency that would ser ve as a symbol of national unity.
The Danes and the British are holding on to their own
currency despite membership in the European Union. Also,
across the entire world, various local, alternative
currencies have arisen: the British LETS (Local Exchange
and Trading Schemes), Ithaca Money in the American
university town of the same name, and the Amsterdam
Noppes, an initiative of action group Strohalm. Such
projects suggest that at least a minority refuses to give
in to the universality of money in postmodern society.
Ar tists have contributed to this resistance toward
the universalizing ef fect of money by modifying or
creating their own money. The Scottish ar tist Chris Byrne
invited ar tists, for instance, to produce alternative
designs for the euro. Eleven designs were selected and
presented to the audience of a French festival for new
media; in most of the designs, ar tists took stances
against globalization and McDonaldization, for which
normal money ser ves, in their view, as an accomplice.
In 1993 fifty-five ar tists, including AR Penck, produced
their own money in Berlin under the designation
Knochengeld (bone money). This money could be used
as a means of payment in the Berlin neighborhood
Prenzlauer Berg on a limited scale. 11
The American ar tist JSG Boggs has committed
himself, since the mid eighties, to his own, alternative

36

16 JSG Boggs, Boggs bill, 100 Swiss francs, 1988 JSG Boggs
2002. Cour tesy Szilage Galler y

37

17 JSG Boggs, Boggs bill, ten dollars, 1994 JSG Boggs 2002.
Cour tesy Szilage Galler y

monetar y system. With a fine pen he meticulously copies

bank notes and then attempts to spend them in day-to-day
economic exchanges. Since the star t of this endeavor
he has managed to carr y out transactions amounting to
more than one million euros. Among the things he has
purchased with his own money are a Harley Davidson,
plane tickets, clothing, ar tworks and rare bank notes; he
has also used it to pay many restaurant and hotel bills.

38

All of these transactions stand midway between a normal,

ever yday use of money, a direct exchange of an original
work of ar t for a consumer product, and an ar tistic
per formance that has only an indirect connection with
the economy. When Boggs purchases objects with his
own money and collectors subsequently attempt to buy
these works of ar t, the values that are realized in these
transactions can scarcely be designated.
Counter feiting is out of the question, as a single
glance is enough to distinguish any note from an original.
Boggs leaves the back of the paper currency blank, for
example, and incorporates all sor ts of witticisms into
the front side. Instead of the signature of a bank
president, one sees his own, with secretar y of measur y
or treasurer of ar t beneath it. A Swiss note of one
hundred francs is adorned with his self-por trait as an
angr y young man, and on an American ten-dollar bill
Boggs has replaced the building of the U.S. Treasur y
with that of the Supreme Cour t. Because his
transactions have led to law suits for counter feiting in
Great Britain, Australia and the United States. For the
past ten years Boggs has been taking legal action
against the American secret ser vice, which confiscated
1,300 items from his studio.
The fact that authorities keep such a close eye on
money ar tists is indicative of the fragile nature of
money: that bank notes function as a means of exchange
is ultimately based on nothing other than trust. In order
to maintain that trust and protect the governments
monopoly on the printing of money, any tampering with
money must be prohibited so goes the reasoning
even if that tampering is done by ar tists. For many
ar tists, however, an irresistible attraction lies with ver y
aspect of trust. With their money ar t they question
the steadfast belief in the value of printed paper (or in
that of all sor ts of other goods such as pearls, horse

blankets, beads, rice, salt, gold, playing cards or

cigarettes, all of which have ser ved as a means of
exchange in the past).
The most radical experiments, in that respect, are

39

those of a handful of ar tists who have actually decided to

destroy money. During the 1960s Yves Klein, whom I
shall discuss later, threw gold into the Seine as par t of a
ritual honoring the sale of what he called zones of
immaterial pictorial sensibility.
In 1979 the German ar tists group Palazzo (Heinz
Zolper, Berd Ackfeld and Michaela Gensmann) attached
four thousand German ten-mark notes to the floor of the
Knstlerhaus in Stuttgar t; the glue used by them made it
impossible to remove the notes after the exhibition
without tearing them to pieces.
Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, two British ar tists
who jointly make up the K Ar t Foundation, set fire to a
million British pounds on the island of Jura, of f the coast
of Scotland, in 1994. The money had been earned by
them in the three previous years as successful makers
of dance music, under the name KLF. Someone who
witnessed this event remarked that he became bored
after awhile. The ar tists themselves have never
been willing to say anything about the mass destruction
of money.12

40

18 Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bonds, 1924 Succession Marcel

Duchamp/ADAGP, c/o Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2004

Hostile Spheres

19

In 1919 Marcel Duchamp wrote out a check to his

dentist Daniel Tzanck in order to pay a bill. The check
represented a value of 115 dollars and was covered by
the imaginar y Teeths Loan and Trust Company,
Consolidated, located on Wall Street. Apar t from its
larger size, the Tzanck Check, as it would come to
be known, looked exactly like a normal check. Duchamp
produced it by hand. In an inter view nearly fifty years
later, he was still emphasizing the amount of work that
was put into the minute details of the check: I took a
long time doing the little letters, to do something which
would look printed it wasnt a small check. 13 One
could say that the check took the opposite course of
Duchamps earlier and much better known readymades
(e.g. the bike wheel, the urinal, the bottle rack,
the snow shovel). By furnishing them with his signature,
Duchamp impor ted the readymades from an impersonal,
industrial economy into the world of ar t. Conversely,
he expor ted the Tzanck Check as an original, unique and
craftsmanly ar twork to an anonymous, monetar y


18

42

economy in which money prevails as the great equalizer.

Tzanck Check was followed, five years later, by the
Monte Carlo Bonds (Obligations pour la Roulette Monte
Carlo), a financial cer tificate that Duchamp produced
in an edition so as to fund a daring roulette project of his
own making. Duchamp was going to break the bank
of Monte Carlo. He deemed it possible to brush aside his
chances and luck and, instead, to play roulette on the
basis of reason and calculation. He did not find a great
deal of suppor t for his plans. Katherine Dreier, one of
Duchamps most impor tant patrons in the United States,
considered the atmosphere of a casino inappropriate
for such a sensitive person as Marcel. Friend and fellow
ar tist Andr Breton, who would in fact eventually
purchase one of the obligations, dismissed the project
as a triviality, as proof of Duchamps desperate state of
mind in those days. Breton was par ticularly concerned
that Duchamp would turn his back on ar t to an
increasing degree. Duchamp himself joked about this in
a letter to another friend, Francis Picabia: You see, I
havent quit being a painter, now I am drawing on
chance.14
Like Tzanck Check, Duchamps Monte Carlo Bond
is a modification of the actual document that was being
traded on financial markets at that time. At the top of the
obligation is a photograph, by Man Ray, of Duchamps face
covered with shaving cream; the background is printed
with small letters that make up the words moustiques
domestiques demistock (domestic mosquitoes halfstock). The document is signed by Duchamps alter ego
Rrose Slavy, president, and by Marcel Duchamp himself
as one of Slavys secretaries. Of the thir ty obligations
that were produced, twelve of them were ultimately sold
for five-hundred francs each. On some obligations the
text 50 cents was stamped next to Duchamps face. All
of the owners of the obligations were to receive an
annual dividend of twenty percent. That little came of
this requires no explanation.
Two other bank notes came about toward the end of
Duchamps life. Czech Check was a favor of Duchamp to
his American friend John Cage, who had organized a
fund-raiser for the American Foundation for Contemporar y
Per formance Ar ts. The document is not a real check, but
is in fact Cages 1964/1965 membership card for a

mushroom club, the Czech Mycological Society. Duchamp

signed the card, which was then auctioned of f for fivehundred dollars. In that same year the New York galler y
Cordier & Ekstrom exhibited Duchamps work: Not Seen
and/or Less Seen of/by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Slavy,
1904-1964. While the exhibition was being held, a
cer tain Philippe Bruno, more a personal fan of Duchamp
than a fer vent ar t enthusiast, came into the galler y.
Bruno had clipped out all of the reviews of the exhibition
beforehand and had pasted them into the exhibition
catalogue. Would Duchamp like to sign this, perhaps on
the check that Bruno had paperclipped to the catalogue
across from the reproduction of Tzanck Check? Duchamp
signed Brunos check and wrote it out for an unlimited
amount to the Banque Mona Lisa. This is how
Cheque Bruno, the last of four financial documents,
came into being.

43

Institutional Criticism
Duchamps financial documents have scarcely received
any attention in the immense quantity of literature
generated by his work. Nonetheless they are among the
earliest examples of imaginar y economics. According
to the few Duchamp exper ts who have spoken about the
financial documents, we are to interpret them as a
criticism of the fundamentals of value or principles of
merit that operate in the ar t world but also of ar ts
privileged status in society. Duchamps documents are
supposedly meant to question the regimes and the
categories that determine the value of cultural
commodities and, in par ticular, the relationship between
the economic and the ar tistic realms. By pompously
placing the word original on his Tzanck Check,
Duchamp shows, for instance, that an ar twork derives
its value par tly from an opposition to the industrial
economy, where originality and uniqueness have no value
whatsoever.
Nothing new perhaps, but at the same time Tzanck
Check, like the other financial documents, undermines
that ver y opposition between the ar t world and the
industrial economy. By fusing ar twork and bank note,
check or obligation, Duchamp suggests that the ar t world,

44

19 Marcel Duchamp, Tzanck Check, 1919 Succession Marcel

Duchamp/ADAGP, c/o Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2004

45

too, is inextricably linked with the economy and that the

division between monetar y and ar tistic value is
ultimately paper-thin. In that respect, the notes echo the
ideas of the American social critic and economist
Thorstein Veblen, who spoke about pecuniar y canons of
taste in his unsurpassed Theor y of the Leisure Class
(1899). In order to be considered beautiful, says Veblen,
objects must not only look beautiful; they must also
be costly, if only for reasons of emulation and what Veblen
calls invidious distinction. In the ar t world, too, taste
has a strong monetar y component. An inexpensive work
of ar t is hardly taken seriously, while a rapidly rising
price is easily seen as a sign of quality.
In inter views Duchamp has also expressed critical
opinions about this equivalence (or at least congruency)
between ar t and economy. Asked why he stopped
painting, Duchamp once responded,
I dont want to copy myself, like all the others. Do you

46

think they enjoy painting the same thing fifty or a

hundred times? Not at all, they no longer make pictures;
they make checks.

And to his patron, the American Katherine Dreier, he

once complained,
The more I live among ar tists, the more I am convinced
that they are fakes from the minute they get successful
in the smallest way. This means also that all the dogs
around the ar tists are crooks. If you see the combination
of fakes and crooks, how have you been able to keep
some kind of faith (and in what?)In the end, a painting
is declared good only if it is wor th so much. 15

The Monte Carlo Bonds fur ther indicate the speculative

nature that gambling and ar t have in common. In both
worlds success seems to be based more on luck than on
merit. Or, as Duchamp wrote to a friend in Paris, Jean
Crotti:
Ar tists throughout histor y are like gamblers in Monte
Carlo, and in the blind lotter y some are picked out while
others are ruinedIt all happens according to random
chance. Ar tists who during their lifetime manage to get

their stuf f noticed are excellent travelling salesmen, but

that does not guarantee a thing as far as the immor tality
of their work is concerned. 16

In the unmasking of the equivalence between ar t and

economy, the signature plays an impor tant role. Peter
Brger, one of the leading theoreticians on the histor y of
the avant-garde, has remarked with respect to this
signature in Duchamps work on the whole:
When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects and sends
them to ar t exhibits, he negates the categor y of
individual creation. The signature, whose ver y purpose it
is to mark what is individual in the work, that it owes its
existence to this par ticular ar tist, is inscribed on an
arbitrarily chosen mass product. because all claims to
individual creativity are to be mocked. Duchamps
provocation not only unmasks the ar t market where the
signature means more than the quality of the work; it

47

radically questions the ver y principle of ar t in bourgeois

society according to which the individual is considered
the creator of the work of ar t. 17

Indeed, there are plenty of examples of ar tworks whose

value declined dramatically after their attribution to a
master could not be upheld. The signature, which is
prominent on all four financial documents, has an even
more specific meaning for these works, since with an
ar twork as well as with a bank note, the signature
functions as a seal of value. Duchamp breaks that seal.

Dying of Boredom
Duchamps financial documents were a prelude
to structural criticism of the capitalist economy which
emerged from the 1960s onwards. I refer to this structural
criticism put for ward by ar tists as critical imaginar y
economics. During the 1960s the movement Situationiste
Internationale, which began as a revolutionar y literar y
magazine in 1957, aimed, like Duchamp, to abolish ar t
as a categor y. Their ideas were inspired by Mar x, in
par ticular by his early work on alienation. 18 What was
wrong with capitalist society was its rigid categorization

of work versus free time or consumption versus

production. Guy Debord, the foremost representative of
the Situationists, wrote in The Society of the Spectacle
(1967) that modern man was so deeply alienated from
his labor force, his fellow man and his environment, that
he had become a spectator of his own life. The material
wealth in which modern man lives is, according to
Debord, in sharp contrast to his cultural pover ty. Modern
man has dozed of f due to deadly tedious work and due
to an awareness that is geared to satisfying pseudoneeds. Those needs are not his own, but are ar tificially
created by capitalism. Modern man has been degraded

48

from a creative subject into a passive object. Who wants

a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of
star vation entails the risk of dying of boredom?
wondered Raoul Vaneigem, the second intellect of the
Situationists.
Though ar tists such as Asger Jorn and Constant
were initially among their members, the revolutionar y
ideas of the Situationists were scarcely ever translated
into ar tistic deeds. In 1972 the group disintegrated
following fundamental disagreement on appropriate
tactics for the realization of Situationist ideals. By that
time critical thinking had gained momentum not only
in France, but also in Germany, par ticularly within the
Frankfur ter Schule. Hans Magnus Enzensberger
presented, in an essay (1962), the term Bewusstseinsindustrie (the industr y of consciousness). In OneDimensional Man (1964) Herber t Marcuse condemned
the repressive, totalitarian regime of post-industrial
society with its seductive pseudo-democracy and its
consumerist, mind-numbing needs. Published just after
the war, Dialectics of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer was being read on a broad scale for
the first time in the 1960s. In this book, Adorno and
Horkheimer made it clear that modern ar t may appear to
be autonomous and, from an economic perspective,
useless but that it nonetheless holds the vestiges of the
capitalist system in which it was generated:
The purposelessness of the great modern work of ar t
depends on the anonymity of the market. Its demands
pass through so many intermediaries that the ar tist is
exempt from any definite requirements though

admittedly only to a cer tain degree, for throughout the

whole histor y of the bourgeoisie his autonomy was only
tolerated, and thus contained in an element of untruth
which ultimately led to the social liquidation of ar t. 19

49

This social liquidation meant that the actual impor tance

of ar t and reflection on it gave way to use a
contemporar y expression to visitor-friendly tours of
galleries, open-studio weekends, crowded cocktail-par ty
openings of exhibitions and the display of pseudoexper tise to each other (what young ar tist is hip, what
new galler y is hot, what fares well on the market, how
big ones network is). Moreover Adorner and Horkheimer
argued that the market af fects what is called the
incommensurability of ar t: whereas ever y work of ar t is
unique and fundamentally incomparable to any other
work, the market aims to reduce ever ything of value to a
common denominator: that of price. The market creates,
after all, direct associations between incomparable
works of ar t and instantly comparable sums of money.
Other members of the Frankfur ter Schule also assailed
the commodification of ar t and culture, that is turning a
work of ar t into a commodity that can be bought and
sold on the market. This commodification supposedly
cripples our critical powers, encourages alienation and
makes the capitalist system immune to cultural
criticism.

Commodity Fetishism
Against this intellectual background, critical ar tistic acts
were carried out at the end of the sixties and seventies.
Activist ar tists groups arose, and some of these
invoked Duchamps institutional criticism. On both sides
of the Atlantic, ar tists were making political/economic
statements by producing work that could not be
commodified: per formances, happenings, conceptual ar t
or inexpensively reproducible prints. In this way they
hoped to circumvent the market. As Lucy Lippard, one of
the leading spokeswomen for this critical ar t of the
seventies, put it: Since dealers cannot sell ar t-as-idea,
economic materialism is denied along with physical
materialism. 20

Ar t and Language, for instance, a group of predominantly

British ar tists and later American ar tists as well, voiced,
in conceptual work but also in theoretical writings, critical

50

20

stances with respect to the conditions under which

ar t circulates in our society. By referring in their work to
classical philosophers, political placards, sheet music
and by recording dialogues among themselves, these
ar tists expanded ar t as a categor y. The changeable,
unconventional form in which they worked made it
difficult for the market to get a grip on their work. That
their circumvention of the market was anything but
coincidental is evident from a remark by Ian Burn, a New
York representative of Ar t & Language. Burn writes that
ar tists are victims of a threefold process of alienation
when they sell their work on the free market. They become
alienated first from their own labor, from the work of ar t
yielded by their labor, and then from their audience:
What we have seen more recently is the power of the
market to distor t all other values, so even the concept of
what is and is not acceptable as workis defined first
and fundamentally by the market and only secondly by
creative urges, wrote Burn in 1975. 21
At the end of the seventies appropriation ar tists
such as Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Louise
Lawler also began carr ying out investigations of the way
in which cultural goods are transformed once they have
been sold on the market for money and of the
motivations underlying the purchase of ar t. They exposed
a world in which ar t mainly evokes associations with
status and proper ty. When I hear the word culture I take
out my checkbook, could be read on one of Barbara
Krugers collages. (The one-liner comes from Jean-Luc
Godards film Le Mpris from 1963.) Lawler made shor t
work of the idea of autonomy by photographing on
location frequently well-known works of ar t by modern
and contemporar y ar tists. Among those locations
were auction houses, supposedly neutral galleries (where
any references to commerce are suppressed and walls
are painted white in emulation of the modern ar t
museum), bedrooms, and lobbies of businesses that buy
ar t for image-boosting purposes. Lawler thereby revealed
the way ar t circulates in society.
Levine photographed reproductions from ar t-histor y

51
20 Louise Lawler, Arranged by Donald Marron, Susan Brundage, Cher yl
Bishop at Paine Webber, 1982. Cour tesy Louise Lawler and Metro Pictures
Galler y

21

books on modern masters such as Vincent van Gogh,

Claude Monet and Egon Schiele. These photographs
were then exhibited with the aim of revealing the
fetishistic connotations of the masterpiece. Her copies
of copies seem to ask what is it that we appreciate
about a masterpiece. To what extent does the name of
an ar tist function as a brand name, just as in the
capitalist economy? Why do copies have less value than
the original in the contemporar y ar t world? Why is this
ar t world so obsessed with tracking down and
stigmatizing forgeries?
The American ar tist Michael Mandiberg recently took
Levines work a step fur ther by placing a photograph by
the American photographer Walker Evans, who had
previously fallen prey to Levines appropriation ar t, on
his website www.aftersherrielevine.com .
Unlike Levine, Mandiberg provides only do-it-yourself
instructions for the production of institutional criticism:
on the website he explains how to print the photograph
and then frame it. Moreover, Mandiberg furnishes a

cer tificate of authenticity which can be filled in and

signed by the do-it-yourselfer. Not Evans, not Levine, not
Mandiberg but the do-it-yourselfer thus becomes the
ar tist. An extra advantage of his project, says
Mandiberg, is that it has no value whatsoever from an
economic point of view. This, in turn, adds to the
credibility of the work as institutional criticism. 22

52

22

Another form of critical imaginar y economics, which

also dates from the seventies, ignores institutional
criticism and the fundamentals of appreciation in modern
ar t. Instead, it focuses on the evils of the financial/
economic system outside the ar t world. During the early
seventies, for example, the German ar tist Hans Haacke
exposed the fraudulent dealings of the New York real
estate broker Shapolsky. Haacke did so with a
combination of journalistic writing and visual material.
He photographed the buildings owned by Shapolsky
and furnished the photographs with detailed explanations
of usurious practices that were run-of-the-mill there.
Shapolsky then managed, via his contacts among the
trustees of New Yorks Guggenheim Museum, to have
Haackes contribution to an exhibition there removed.
For his Manet-PROJEKT 74 Haacke examined the
socio-economic status of individuals who were
the successive owners of Manets painting Bundle of
Asparagus ever since this work was first sold. For this he
also carried out an investigation of the wheelings and
dealings of chairman Abs of the Wallraf-Richar tz Museum
in Cologne, which had acquired the Manet for its
permanent collection. It appeared that Abs was not only
chairman of the museum s board, but also that of
nineteen multinationals. Evidently he was not pleased
with the prospect of this information becoming public,
because the museum, which had invited Haacke himself
to create a work for its 150 th anniversar y, subsequently
turned down his contribution. The director of the
museum told him in a letter: A museum knows nothing
about economic power. It does indeed, however, know
something about spiritual power.
In his writings Haacke fur thermore made a thorough
investigation of Peter Ludwig, the celebrated German
collector, chocolate manufacturer and powerbroker
in the international ar t world. Haacke fixed the readers
attention on the capitalist system (including the low

53
21

Michael Mandiberg, Untitled (AfterSherrieLevine.com/2.jpg), 2001

22 Hans Haacke, Manet-PROJEKT 74, 1974 Hans Haacke, c/o

Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2004 [OVB, WORDT NOG BEVESTIGD!!!!!!!!!!]

wages of workers on cocoa plantations) that enabled

Ludwig to build one of the most prominent collections of
modern ar t in the world. He also argued that Ludwigs
unexpected decision to collect Russian ar t at the end of
the Cold War was mainly based on strategic
considerations: by doing so, Ludwig had hoped to create
goodwill in Russia and thereby open up a new market for
his chocolate empire.
A kind of synopsis of Haackes outlook on big
business came many years after the Abs and Shapolsky
af fairs, at documenta X in Kassel. For his contribution
Haacke placed a series of quotes on posters originating
from businesses that sponsor ar t exhibitions. One of
the posters reads: Whoever pays controls. Apparently
not much has changed since premodern, feudal times
when a Maecenas had a significant say in how a painting
was carried out.23

54

Commerce as Provocation
In the current revival of imaginar y economics, there is no
lack of criticism, yet in two respects this criticism dif fers
from the appropriation ar t and documentar y work from
the seventies and early eighties. In institutional criticism
the accent has shifted from ar tistic values such as
originality, autonomy and unicity to the elitism of the ar t
world, its social exclusiveness and the power held by
such gatekeepers in this political/cultural configuration
as curators and critics. From a strategic point of view,
critical imaginar y economics is now situated not outside,
but inside the market. Ar tists use the market as
provocation for a snobbish ar t world that has always
wished to keep a distance from commerce, or they see
the market rather, in a more or less genuine way, as
an instrument for the democratization of the ar t world.
The American activist ar tistsgroup RTMark auctioned
of f, for instance, the much-sought admission tickets to
the exclusive opening of New Yorks Whitney Biennial
(2000), in which they themselves were represented. The
act was characteristic of this internet group, which takes
a politically active stance on the one hand, and yet
is not averse to using economic rhetoric with tongue in
cheek, of course. RTMark calls itself a broker which

23,24 Jens Haaning, Super Discount, Fri-Ar t, Fribourg, 1998.

Photographs: Eliane Laubschner. Cour tesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner,
Kopenhagen / Johann Knig, Berlin

56
25 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Das Soziale Kapital, Migros Museum fr Gegenwar tskunst, Zrich, 1999. Photograph: Rita Palanikumar. Cour tesy
Migros Museum fr Gegenwar tskunst, Zrich

23,24

acquires means from investors and then employs these

means for the sabotage of politically/economicallycorrect consumer goods, such as dolls, electronic games
or educational material. RTMark is indeed just a
corporation and benefits from corporate protections, but
unlike other corporations, its bottom line is to improve
culture rather than its own pocketbook; it seeks cultural
profit, not financial, they write on their website
(www. r tmark.com).
The New York ar tist Stephen Keene attempted to
make ar t accessible and to eliminate the status ef fect
of expensive ar t by selling it at rock-bottom prices. For
the exhibition The Miracle Half-Mile: Ten Thousand
Paintings by Stephen Keene at the Santa Monica
Museum of Ar t (2000) Keene produced, for example, ten
thousand paintings which could be purchased on the
spot by visitors for prices ranging from three to a
hundred dollars. The Brazilian ar tist Cildo Meireles made
a similar gesture by selling ar t-sicles at documenta XI
for one euro apiece. The Danish ar tist Jens Haaning

57
26 Christoph Bchel en Gianni Motti, Capital Af fair, Zrich, 2002.
Cour tesy Christoph Bchel

25

lured outsiders into the ar t world by selling airplane

tickets at the Berlin galler y Mehdi Chouakri. By labelling
the tickets as ar t, he could calculate a lower tax, which
made the tickets less expensive. The philosophical
question as to what ar t actually is thereby acquired a
strategic application. In the Fri-Ar t Kunsthalle, Haaning
later opened a supermarket, Super Discount, where
he of fered food and consumer items at reduced prices.
He had used his exhibition budget to purchase these
products himself in France, by which he too could
circumvent various taxes with his status as an ar tist.
The inhabitants of Fribourg, only too happy to go after a
bargain, came in droves. The ar tist Rirkrit Tiravanija also
set up a supermarket under the title Das soziale Kapital.
This was simplified due to the fact that the museum
involved, the Migros Museum in Zurich, is sponsored by
a supermarket chain of the same name. Among the
consumer items in the shop, which were actually being
sold as well, Tiravanija exhibited his own work, along side
ar tworks by others such as Dan Flavin, Thomas Schtte

27 Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Talking About / Pacific

(Plenty Objects of Desire), Ar t Unlimited, Bazel, 2000. Cour tesy
Air de Paris, Paris

and Gilber t & George from the museums permanent

collection. Shopping and visiting a museum thus became
inter twined.24 And finally at Frankfur ts Schirn Kunsthalle,

26

60

for the exhibition Shopping. 100 Jahre Kunst und

Konsum, Guillaume Bijl installed an entire supermarket
which was supplied with fresh products ever y day.
Until now, the most radical project that employs
economic means in order to bring ar t closer to an
audience unacquainted with it has come from the two
Swiss ar tists Christoph Bchel and Gianni Motti. Instead
of conver ting the exhibition budget placed at their
disposal by Zurichs Helmhaus in 2002 into new work,
they decided to hide in the museum a cer tificate that
would give the finder the right to those funds. For the sixweek period of the exhibition, visitors were to be given
the oppor tunity to find this cer tificate, wor th 50,000
Swiss francs. A notar y determined that if either of the
two ar tists would reveal the location of the cer tificate
before the close of the exhibition, he would be fined
the same amount. If no visitor found the cer tificate, the
money would become the proper ty of the ar tists. The
name of this project was Capital Af fair.
The design of the exhibition conceived by Bchel and
Mottis was not only to lure the visitor into the museum,
but also to confront him with the fetishistic desires
that are inherent in the act of visiting a museum: we
want to see masterpieces, one highlight after another,
preferably with immediate mention of the works market
value. The ar tists left the exhibition spaces empty a
reference to Yves Kleins exhibition Void in 1959: an
entirely vacant Paris galler y, but a box-office hit
nonetheless. As such, a visit to the Helmhaus would be
transformed into a remarkable combination of Buddhist
contemplation in the void and a vulgar treasure hunt.
Ironically enough, Capital Af fair could have prompted the
visitor to make meticulous obser vations and to focus on
ever y detail, though not for aesthetic but for
materialistic reasons. That gave the objective of the
exhibition a surprisingly anti-elitist aspect: ar t may only
draw the elite crowd, but the chance of winning money
brings in the masses. Ultimately the exhibition was never
held, however. Once Zurichs municipal president
Elmar Ledergerber got wind of the project and had the
budget lowered to 20,000 Swiss francs, Motti and

61
28 Free Manifesta, 2002, in the background, an ar twork by Katherin
Bhm. Cour tesy Sal Randolph

27

Bchel decided to cancel the show just before the

opening. They accused Ledergerber of censorship.
According to contemporar y imaginar y economics,
the established institutions would benefit from
democratization not only where visitors are concerned,
but also with respect to the selection of ar tists. That
is why the electronic-media duo www. kkep.com wanted
to auction of f the wall space that was placed at their
disposal for the exhibition For Real at Amsterdams
Stedelijk Museum. Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger,
an Austrian duo who now no longer work together, rented
out pedestals in the spaces for which they themselves
were invited to create work. The renters of the pedestals
(individuals, companies or other ar tists) could use
these for their own presentation purposes. With the
profits from the project, which they titled Plenty Objects
of Desire, Dejanov & Heger then purchased ar t.
Delving into the same issues, Bchel again took a
bigger approach. In 2002 he sold, via eBay, his right
to par ticipate in Frankfur ts Manifesta 4 (which included

62

a production budget, insurance, daily wages and a

publication contribution) to the highest bidder. With his
contribution, which he called Invite yourself, Bchel
broke through the monopoly that curators have in the
allocation of scarce museum space and institutional
attention. The highest bidder and therefore the winner of
Bchels spot was the New York ar tist Sal Randolph. She
paid 15,099 dollars for her right to par ticipate in the
Manifesta. Randoph, herself a notorious opponent of the
market, then invited ar tists from all over the world to
take par t in her own project Free Manifesta. (In the same
year she also held a Free Biennial in Venice.) In contrast
to the real Manifesta, with its shady selection process,
Randolph admitted ever yone: Any ar tist who wishes may
par ticipate with such works as ephemeral installations,
guerilla per formances, interactions, drives, situations,
giveaways, ambulator y declamations, par ties,
neohappenings, apar tment shows, guided experiences,
screenings, projections, mail ar t, downloadable music,
web-based work, she wrote on her invitation. Let a
thousand flowers bloom.

Gift Economics
RTMark, Bchel, Motti, Keene and others use the market
not as an instrument of exploitation and alienation,
but of liberation and democratization. That may sound
far-fetched, cer tainly to leftist thinkers, but even in the
nineteenth centur y Mar x recognized that, through its
destructive capacity, the market possesses a positive
force that can be turned against existing power
structures. The rise of capitalism during the nineteenth
centur y led, for instance, to the destruction of premodern
feudal structures in which ser fs scarcely had lives of
their own.
This does not mean that the market is now
unanimously embraced within critical imaginar y
economics. Though Randolph had taken possession of
her par ticipation in Manifesta by means of a market
transaction, her actual Manifesta project involved
the development of an alternative economy for that same
market, which revolved around the gift. In the work of
more than a hundred ar tists who ultimately took par t in


28

63

Free Manifesta this notion of the gift resounded, in fact,

much to Randolphs pleasure. The Por tuguese ar tist
Susan Mendes Silva gave her phone number to anyone
who wanted to talk with her about contemporar y ar t. The
American Kathe Izzo of fered to fall in love with you for a
day and to experience this by e-mail. More than four
thousand ar tworks made by more than for ty ar tists were
given away from the free ar t arena, par t of Randolphs
headquar ters at the Manifesta.
For various reasons, in a range of ways and with
dif ferent degrees of success, other ar tists have, like
Randolph, also attempted to introduce the gift to (ar t)
economy. Gifts are said to create a form of independence
with respect to the laws of demand and supply. They are
supposedly superior from a social standpoint, because
they ignore the economic model of self-interest and
individuality and, instead, make room for the other and
for reciprocity. Whereas the market, geared as it is
to measurement and payment, would harm the quality of
ar tistic experiences, the gift supposedly safeguards
those ver y experiences. Lewis Hyde, who wrote a book
about ar t and the gift, even argues, somewhat
romantically and unquestionably contrar y to all empirical
evidence, that ar t has by nature the character of a gift:
If it is true that in the essential commerce of ar t a gift is
carried by the work from the ar tist to his audience, if I
am right to say that where there is no gift there is no ar t,
then it may be possible to destroy a work by conver ting it
into a pure commodity.25
Numerous examples of such gift creations can be
provided. Felix Gonzales-Torres used to place a stack of
posters in the space where he had an exhibition; visitors
could help themselves. Sometimes politically relevant
images would be printed on the posters, such as
photographs of all the Americans who lost their lives in
rifle accidents. Other times those images seemed to
have a more poetic nature: a photograph, for instance,
of a bird flying across a clouded sky.
In 1993 Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David
Avalos were invited by the Museum of Contemporar y Ar t
in San Diego to take par t in an exhibition on the
Mexican-American border and handed out their exhibition
budget (5000 dollars) in ten-dollar bills to illegal
immigrants who congregate at the border to find work in

29 Sylvie Fleury, Serie ELA 75/K (Easy. Breezy. Beautiful.), 2000.

Cour tesy Sylvie Fleur y, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zrich

the United States. They called their work Ar t Rebate. The

Dutch ar tist Henk Heideveld broke into the prison of
Zwolle in order to hand out books and paintings to the
inmates. And within net.ar t the internet ar t that
flourished among hackers, computer exper ts and visual
ar tists during the nineties the gift circulates in the
form of open-source software in which net.ar t is usually
written. Unlike commercial software, it is accessible to
ever yone and can be adapted as desired by the user.
Other net.ar t can be enjoyed free of charge on the
internet. Just how impor tant this alternative logic of the
gift has been within net.ar t is evident from the fact that
net.ar tists who tried to cash in their work at the end of
the nineties (by selling it, for instance, as an installation
in a galler y or by requiring an admission fee for their
websites) and no longer worked with open-source
software, were accused of selling out to commerce. 26

65

The (un)Impor tance of Proper ty

Criticism within contemporar y imaginar y economics is
not confined to the political economy of the ar t world
itself. As par t of a renewed social commitment, various
ar tists examine economic phenomena, such as
consumption and the desire for proper ty, with a range of
means. Andrea Zittel produces, for example, ready-made
household furnishings with titles such as A to Z living
unit customized for Eileen and Peter Nor ton, which of fer
the buyer a completely new lifestyle. With this she
unmasks the promises of lifestyle marketing: buy this
piece of design furniture and you will have social status,
individuality and a carefree life. 27 Sylvie Fleur y uses
the visual and linguistic codes of the musts
per fumes, fashion and accessories in order to pinpoint
the superficiality of this world. For this she exhibits the
luxurious but empty packaging and delicate shopping
bags of exclusive designer stores whose main branches
are in London, Milan, Paris or New York. These trophies
from shopping crusades are readymades, but they have
little to do with Duchamps institutional criticism. The
packaging and bags are reminiscent, on the one hand, of
the joy of each purchase and, on the other, of its fleeting
nature. The viewer knows that the frustration which


29

30,31

66

remains will soon lead to yet another shopping expedition.

Fleur y also gilded a shopping car t from a supermarket
and placed this, as an icon of present-day society, on a
reflecting base. The Italian ar tist Maurizio Cattelan
produced a similar gesture by enlarging a shopping car t
to oversized dimensions.
The British ar tist Michael Landy investigated not the
activity of shopping itself, but rather the result of this
activity: possessions. At the beginning of 2001, he
destroyed all of his own possessions in a systematic
manner. For this he drew up an inventor y of the 7006
objects that he owned. Ever y object was put in a plastic
bag and registered under a number. Then his proper ty
was transpor ted to a vacant shop space in London.
There a conveyor belt was set up and manned by about
ten of Landys assistants, all of them in uniform. They
placed each object, one by one, into a bin on the conveyor
belt, where the objects were subsequently dismantled
into par ts. The conveyor belt crossed the shop space
and eventually ended up at a grinder. The powder
emitted by this machine was separated into its various
types of materials such as plastic, metal, wood, paper
and cloth. Also letters, his passpor t and bir th
cer tificate, and even works made by Landys friends
Chris Ofili and Gar y Hume and his girlfriend Gillian
Wearing had to bear the brunt of this. The last object to
be destroyed was Landys most cherished possession:
a sheepskin coat once worn by his father.
The ar tist called this project Break Down. While it
was being carried out, Landy was visited by a nun, a
priest and a psychiatrist, all of whom believed that he
needed help. He could not have his mother present
throughout the exercise, since she cried. Landy himself
was no less moved. In the media he let it be known
that during the destruction of his proper ty he had a
sense of attending at his own funeral. With the
destruction of the sheepskin coat, he feared placing a
curse on his deceased father.28
With their work, ar tists such as Zittel, Fleur y and
Landy suggest that exploitation in our society has shifted
from the production sector, where Mar x found it, to the
consumption sector. The long working hours, low
wages and factories with unhealthy working conditions
may have vanished from early capitalist society, but

exploitation remains. With regard to this, the American

sociologist George Ritzer speaks about new means
of consumption in analogy to Mar xs notion of means
of production. In todays post-industrial (consumer)
society, the credit cards, the adver tisements and
shopping paradises are what the assembly line and the

67

factor y were to industrial (production) society: instruments

aimed at the exploitation of yesterdays workers, todays
consumers. The new means of consumption enable big
business to manipulate consumers and prompt them
involuntarily to buy goods, for which they frequently have
no need at all. 29
The works of these ar tists tell, in other words,
about the social functions of consumption in
contemporar y society. Implicitly they yield criticism of
the hedonistic paradigm of economic science, which
recognizes consumption only as a means of satisfying
material needs. They show, after all, that ownership and
consumption play a constituent and even sacred role in
our society. The patterns of consumption examined by
these ar tists promise, to use the words of the classic
German sociologist Max Weber, a re-enchantment of our
modern, thoroughly rationalized society. The new religion
is one of consumption, the shopping centers and malls
being the new cathedrals. At the same time Landy,
Fleur y and Zittel suggest that our economy despite the
neoliberal economic discourse of efficiency and
rationality bears a strong resemblance to the ritualistic,
relational, expressive and ostensibly irrational
economies from anthropological literature. Landys work
demonstrates, for example, that there is more than
simply a material side to possession. It is just as much
about maintaining social relationships as it is about
fulfilling needs. Objects given to us by others and there
are quite a few of them cause our own lives to be linked
with those of others. Those objects cannot, therefore, be
cast aside or destroyed without difficulty. This is why
Landys project brought about such emotional responses.

Globalization
In addition to consumption and ownership, globalization
can be identified as a theme within imaginar y economics

68
30 Michael Landy, Break Down, commissioned and produced by Ar t
Angel, 2001. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning. Cour tesy Ar t Angel

31 Michael Landy, Break Down, commissioned and produced by Ar t

Angel, 2001. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning. Cour tesy Ar t Angel

69

32,33,34

and within contemporar y ar t in general. Embedded in

the global activism of Seattle and Genoa, the theoretical
initiatives of alternative globalists such as Naomi Klein
and Noreena Her tz, and a greatly increased concern
for contemporar y ar t from non-Western countries (think
of the organization of biennials in places such as
Johannesburg, Sao Paulo and Istanbul, or documenta XI
curated by Okwui Enwezor) more and more ar tists are
denouncing social inequality, cultural imperialism and
political unrest caused by globalization. The Mexican
ar tist Santiago Sierra shows, for instance, on a micro
level how exploitation in a global economy works. In his
socio-economic experiments Sierra entices socially or
geographically disadvantaged communities to per form
extreme, often self-mutilating acts in exchange for
money. The ar tist makes no bones about the fact that he
considers these people his own personal guinea pigs.
Many are evidently quite prepared to humiliate themselves
for Sierra. In Havana the ar tist had unemployed young
men to masturbate in front of the camera; in the Spanish

70

32 Santiago Sierra, Object measuring 600x57x52 cm constructed to

be held horizontally to a wall. Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zrich, April
2001. Cour tesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zrich

71
33 Santiago Sierra, 133 people paid to have their hair dyed blond.
Arsenale, Venice, June 2001. Cour tesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zrich

34 Santiago Sierra, Person paid to have 30-cm line tattooed on back.

Calle Regina 51, Mexico City, May 1998. Cour tesy Galerie Peter
Kilchmann, Zrich

35 Fiona Hall, Leaf Litter (Actinidia deliosa Chinese gooseberr y),

2001. Cour tesy Fiona Hall en Roslyn Oxley9 Galler y

36 Fiona Hall, Leaf Litter (Hevea brasiliensis rubber tree), 2001.

Cour tesy Fiona Hall en Roslyn Oxley9 Galler y

town Salamanca he managed to get heroin prostitutes to

allow a line to be tatooed on their backs; Sierra had men
carr y out completely pointless labor for him (such as
suppor ting a heavy object in a galler y space) and for the
2001 Venice Biennial he persuaded 133 street vendors,
from all corners of the ear th, collectively to dye their hair
blond. 30

35,36

73

37,38

Though the message is no less dramatic, Australian

ar tist Fiona Hall opts for subdued means at least in
comparison to Sierra. In her work Hall investigates the
historical and contemporar y connection between
colonization, commerce and nature by painting old bank
notes with plant motifs. These motifs are depicted by her
in gouache, detailed and actual size, in such a way that
the details of the bank notes can be seen through the
depictions. In the past, plants have played a significant
role in the growth of European colonial prosperity and
power, as her work shows. This resulted not only in
a dispersion of millions of people, who were forced to
work as slaves on sugar and cotton plantations, but also
in an ecological dispersion: plants were transpor ted from
one continent to the other for commercial reasons. It
scarcely needs to be said that the frequently destructive
connection, as seen by Hall, between monetar y gain and
social or ecological catastrophe is anything but severed.
Meschac Gaba is occupied with similar sor ts of
global issues and, to that end, makes use of shredded
bank notes that he happened to find in the trash container
of a bank in Benin. Gaba then produced collages with
these shreds. He used them in the form of confetti,
made necklaces, pins and paper coins, and papered
installations with them. The shredded notes in various
denominations that he eventually managed to obtain
also from the Dutch central bank not only ser ve
as inexpensive material, but also have great expressive
powers. Their wor thlessness can stand for the
subordinate, dependent position of African economies.
The shreds also symbolize the vulnerability of modern
monetar y systems: the shredding, a simple material
transformation, reduces the much-wanted paper
currency to nothing more than garbage. In Gabas work,
however, they are treated to a new life. Some shredded
money even returned to its original surroundings in
the form of an ar twork that Gaba sold to a bank in West

74
37 Meschac Gaba, Bust, 1999. Photograph: Edo Kuipers. Cour tesy
Lumen Travo

39,39a

Africa. In that sense the work of Gaba deals with the

dif ferent regimes of value in which objects can circulate
successively or simultaneously.
Western European ar tists have likewise investigated
globalization in a critical manner. At Copenhagens
Fashion Week, for example, the Danish ar tists collective
Super flex presented a fashion line of Lacoste polo
shir ts. Displayed on each shir t was not only the famous
green crocodile, but also the word supercopy in big
letters. With this Super flex brought attention to the copy
industr y (clothing, compact disks, watches, per fumes,
etc.) by which workers in non-Western countries attempt
to make ends meet in semi-illegality. 31
Finally American ar tist Mark Lombardi maps out
global networks by way of large pencil drawings. The
centers of these networks, generally dozens per drawing,
consist of multinationals, banks, government institutions,
undercover agencies and influential political figures.
The lines connecting these centers represent, for
example, financial transactions and relations of political

75
38 Meschac Gaba, Red Money, 1999. Photograph: Edo Kuipers.
Cour tesy Lumen Travo

influence. Like a scientist explaining complex material

with the aid of tables, graphics and histograms, Lombardi
introduces order to a world of arms, drugs and black
money. He shows how Ronald Reagan and George Bush
Sr. armed Iraq during the 1980s, how the Vatican has
connections with the arms industr y and how Bill Clinton,
too, was unable to hold the Mafia at bay. Lombardis
order appears to be relative, however. Obsessive as he
was, Lombardi constructed labyrinthine networks
crammed with detail and full of his own paranoia in
which the viewer easily becomes entangled.

Lack of Persuasiveness
Surely all of these ar tworks are critical, whether they
deal with the economy of the ar ts, the postmodern
consumer society or the globalization processes that
disrupt major par ts of the world. But by no means do all
of them succeed in their intentions. In that respect,

76
39 Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson
Stevens c. 1979-1990, 5th version. Cour tesy Pierogi 2000, New York

39a Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson

Stevens c. 1979-1990, 5th version (detail). Cour tesy Pierogi 2000,
New York

77

it is only a minor problem that some of these works have

led to incomprehension, or worse, indif ference. Visitors
are attracted to the money (Bchel and Motti), the
discounts (Haaning) or the spectacle (Landy) without
necessarily perceiving a critical under tone.
More fundamental is the shor tcoming that such
critical imaginar y economics easily becomes swept into
the neutralizing vor tex of the ar t world and thereby loses
critical impor t. Thus ar tists who attempted to circumvent
the market during the seventies by producing unsaleable
work seem to have actually stimulated the economy
of the ar ts and the role of galleries in this economy. The
per formances that were held in galleries did, after all,
draw attention, and that was something which galler y
owners could cer tainly use for the sale of the other
commodifiable work. They could say, look, we can even
deal with this!, admitted per formance ar tist Vito
Acconci in retrospect. It was therefore a form of window
dressing. And although a great deal of ar t from the
seventies may have been difficult to sell, that could not

be said about the documentation of it, for which a

growing demand could be seen on the ar t market as time
went by.32

78

The apotheosis of this assimilation was the auction

sale of Haackes On Social Grease at the end of the
eighties. The work ridicules six impor tant figures from
the world of business and politics, each of whom argued
for the financial suppor t of ar t by saying that ar t is
an ef fective social lubricant. An ar t collector from
the American Midwest had no problem in putting down
90,000 dollars for On Social Grease when it was
auctioned at Christies.
For that matter, ar tists such as Levine and Kruger,
who indeed criticize the ar t market and yet sell their
work in New Yorks most commercial galleries without
any scruples, actively encourage this assimilation. The
galler y sale of works such as Levines bronze cast of
Duchamps urinal, whose critical potential was not
exactly abundant anyway due to an endless repetition of
Duchamps strategy, made Dada worse than socially
acceptable. A problematic aspect of Levines work is
fur thermore that, despite her criticism of originality and
authenticity, she generally puts her works on the market
as unique pieces. And so precisely that for which Peter
Brger warned the neo-avant-garde in the seventies
could happen: that institutional criticism would itself
become institutionalized, encapsulated by the market
and burdened with the dubious status of officially
recognized ar t. 33
Another objection to critical imaginar y economics is
that, despite its critique of economic capital, it depends
itself on another type of capital. Here, the French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu provides a clue. In his
investigation of the ar tistic field, Bourdieu comes to the
conclusion that the market for ar t and other symbolic
goods is similar to a pre-capitalist economy. This market
is determined by what he calls a denegation of the
economy: in order to establish ones reputation in the
ar t world, it is necessar y to take an altruistic stance and
show no interest whatsoever in monetar y gain.34
Nonetheless, says Bourdieu, this denegation of the
economy involves a form of economic rationale and does
not stand in the way of obtaining profit. More than
that, denegation is a precondition for profit: by feigning

79

an altruistic love of ar t and criticizing the capitalist

economy, ar tists accumulate symbolic capital. They
acquire, in other words, a reputation, institutional
recognition and the legitimate power to bestow ar tistic
value on objects. This symbolic capital can, in the long
run, be transformed into economic capital, that is to say
hard cash.
It is therefore hardly dramatic or decisive that ar tists
are prepared to sacrifice their own belongings (Landy)
or even their own ar tistr y (Mandiberg). On a meta level,
their projects can be seen as exchange transactions
from which they become not poorer but richer. Landy, for
instance, was given ample coverage by the British press
during and after his destruction act. The public flocked
to the project 40,000 strong. Then came of fers from all
sor ts of cultural institutions, including a peculiar request
from the Sao Paulo Biennial to do another mild rendition
of the proper ty destruction. In addition to this, Landy
acquired valuable cultural currency in the form of a
book and a documentar y that record his project. Seen
from that perspective, one could sooner speak of a big
trade-in (Landys possessions for a considerable
augmentation of his symbolic capital) than of a big
destruction.
The originally Vietnamese ar tist Trong Nguyen, who
like John Freyer sold his belongings via the internet (in
his case, 1001 objects, all of them furnished with
a cer tificate of authenticity), seems to be aware of this
primacy of symbolic capital. 35 The first object that he
sold via eBay was a book by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz
titled Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Ar tist.
Precisely because such projects can scarcely be
distinguished from ever yday dealings, their added value
depends on a romantic myth of the ar tist. That romantic
myth is much less discussed than we are made to think
by contemporar y discourse on ar t, critical as it is of
modern notions of originality, creativity or authenticity. In
practice, these ar tists continue to milk the idea that a
cer tain magical, transforming power lies hidden in their
own actions.
In shor t, the balance between being ignored as an
ar tist on the one hand existing on the fringes, having
to get by without grants or sales and becoming
assimilated, on the other, by the cultural and economic

institutions which are the object of criticism is extraordinarily precarious. Many ar tists do not even tr y to find
this balance. Taken in by this delightful society, enticed
by the institutional attention that lies ahead for them,
thoroughly aware of how difficult it is to change existing
structures or disillusioned by the shrugs of the public,
they surrender to commerce.

80

Good Business
is the Best Art
Toward the end of his life, Marcel Duchamp was signing
not only readymades and checks, but all sor ts of objects
presented to him by admirers on various occasions. At
that point his fame was greater than ever before,
cer tainly in the United States. Various museums were
dedicating exhibitions to Duchamp, the glossy magazine
Vogue inter viewed him, dif ferent institutions were
making his work the subject of round-table discussions
in which he himself gladly took par t, and gradually there
emerged a substantial body of literature aimed at the
futile task of pinning down Duchamps work to one
meaning or another. The ar tist himself showed his great
contentment with all of this attention. 36
Time and again, Duchamp himself became par t of
the mechanisms and institutions which he criticized with
his financial documents. Throughout the course of his
life he became friends with bourgeois collectors in
France and the United States: among them were Jean
Doucet, Katherine Dreier and the Arensbergs, prominent
ar t dealers such as Sidney Janis, Julien Levy and Ar turo

Schwarz, influential museum directors such as Alfred

Barr of New Yorks Museum of Modern Ar t, Walter Hopps
of the Pasadena Ar t Museum in California and Fiske
Kimball of the Philadelphia Museum of Ar t. Not only did
he provide assistance to these collectors and galler y
owners; from the mid 1920s to the early 1940s, he also
earned a par t of his living from dealing in ar t. In 1926
Duchamp helped out fellow ar tist Picabia by purchasing

82

eighty works from him. He framed these works, described

them in a catalogue text under the pseudonym Rrose
Slavy and sold them successfully at the Paris auction
house Htel Drouot. Not long after that he bought,
together with his close friend Henri-Pierre Roch, twentynine sculptures by Brancusi from the estate of John
Quinn, a wealthy American collector and early admirer of
Brancusis work. Brancusi himself encouraged Duchamp
and Roch to do so, because he was afraid that the
sculptures would not maintain their value when so many
came onto the market at one time. After the purchase
Duchamp organized an exhibition of Brancusis
sculptures at the Brummer Galler y in New York, where
several works were sold. In the fifteen years to follow,
the rest of the collection would find its way, piece by piece,
to new owners via Duchamp.
The low point of these commercial transactions was
Duchamps collaboration with the Italian writer and ar t
dealer Ar turo Schwarz, who was to reproduce thir teen of
his readymades, including the urinal, the bottle rack
and the bicycle wheel. According to Schwarz, Duchamp
himself came up with the idea, because he regretted
that so many of the original readymades were lost and
that it was impossible to bring together the works that
still existed. Duchamp was actively involved in the
production process, the pricing, the size of the edition
and the ultimate presentation.37 After that Schwarz
would sell the edition on a commercial basis, from his
galler y.
Perhaps the most impor tant reason why Duchamp
took his chances with Schwarz was simply the money:
since he had given away almost all of his work in
the past, his reputation had never been translated into
monetar y terms. Never theless, the under taking proved
to be controversial. By authorizing the reproductions,
Duchamp had turned the strength of his work upon itself.

If the readymades deconstructed modernist views on

originality, then the later editions deconstructed this
ver y critical potential. In the opinion of his friend
Max Ernst, this compromised the great beauty of the
readymade. Rober t Lebel, one of the first Duchamp
exper ts, refused to include a single replica in the
exhibitions he organized. Daniel Buren deemed that
Duchamp had betrayed himself. John Cage wondered
why Duchamp permitted all of this, since what he
was carr ying out with Schwarz was business and not ar t.
Many others felt similarly misled. They were indignant
about the proliferation and commercialization of
Duchamps work. Declared opponents of Duchamps
work saw their ver y prejudices being confirmed: here was
the unmasking of a charlatan who had cleverly managed
to draw attention to himself far too long. 38 An affirmative
interpretation of imaginar y economics soon became
imperative: rather than providing criticism, Duchamp
grants his approval to the market.

83
American Supermarket
During the sixties, while Duchamp was disappointing
his friends and being exposed to his enemies, American
ar tists rever ted to Dada. By incorporating consumer
goods and ar tefacts from popular culture into their work,
they inter fered, as Duchamp did, with the relationship
between ar t and the economy. Pop Ar t was initially,
especially in Europe, received as a form of protest ar t, a
welcome assault on the elitism which ruled the ar t world
until then. The contrast between the frivolity of Pop Ar t
and the loftiness of the style that was still in vogue at
that time, abstract expressionism, could hardly be
greater.39 Just as in the work of critical ar tists such as
Bchel, the presence of icons from the economy in Pop
Ar t can thus be seen as a provocation. Nonetheless,
Pop Ar t allows itself to be interpreted as a glorification of
consumer society, which was gaining momentum as the
twentieth centur y progressed. The work of Tom
Wesselman displays, for instance, strong resemblances
to the American adver tising vocabular y of the sixties.
Claes Oldenburg inflated ever yday consumer items into
large sizes and made deflated sculpture out of them. Andy

Warhol copied Campbells soup cans two-dimensionally

and Brillo boxes three-dimensionally. Fur thermore, his
first screen prints depicted dollar bills.
Unlike Duchamps readymades, these consumption
images aim to please the eye and are scarcely prepared
to prompt any form of reflection. Duchamp, who had
always selected his readymades with a cer tain
indif ference, wrote at the time of Pop Ar t to his friend
Hans Richter with some irritation: In Neo-Dada they
have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty
in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into
their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for
their aesthetic beauty. 40 And whereas Duchamps

84

financial documents apparently were meant to reveal the

congruency between the domain of ar t and that of the
economy and thereby negate it Pop ar tists presented
this congruency as a fait accompli, or worse, as an
achievement.
Transgression of the boundar y between ar t and
commerce occurred not only in the choice of subject
matter by Pop ar tists. A market metaphor also
determined the way in which they organized the
production, distribution and consumption of their work.
Almost without exception, these ar tists rose to fame
quickly, not least of all because of the commercial
galler y scene that was flourishing in those days in New
York, with the legendar y ar t dealer Leo Castelli as its key
figure. Some Pop ar tists, such as Andy Warhol and
James Rosenquist, came from the world of adver tising
and regarded the step to the world of visual ar t as
being negligible. Famous for aphorisms such as Being
good in business is the most fascinating kind of ar t
and Making money is ar t and working is ar t and good
business is the best ar t, Warhol considered business
ar t to be the phase that comes after ar t.41 He put
museums on a par with depar tment stores and called
his studio The Factor y, a black box that would always
conceal whether Warhol himself was responsible for
the ar tworks or whether they were produced by one of
his ar t workers. This studio model, in which invention
and execution are separate from each other just as in
the industrial economy and in which there is an
organized division of labor between the ar tist himself
and his assistants, would later be revived by a variety of

ar tists such as Mark Kostabi, Jef f Koons and Joep van

Lieshout. 42
The stor y goes that during the early sixties, when
Warhols career as an ar tist failed to get anywhere,
much to his frustration, he had no idea what to paint. For
that reason he asked for advice from galler y owner and
friend Muriel Latow. She told him that Warhol should
simply paint what he loved most, or what ever yone would
recognize there happen to be dif ferent versions of
the stor y. Whatever the case, the ar tist was thinking of
money. In spite of their friendship, Latow made a
commercial transaction from this consultation: she
charged him fifty dollars for it. The transaction worked
out rather well for Warhol, as his definitive debut on the
ar t scene was made with the paintings and screen prints
of dollar bills. 43

85

Seeing that most Pop ar tists produced their work in

series, as Warhol did, and by this alone were basically
attempting to obliterate the borderline between ar t and
the economy, they did not feel bound by the ar t market
and its logic of uniqueness. And so in 1961 Claes
Oldenburg was exhibiting his squashy sculptures of
ever yday objects (shoes and socks, dresses and shir ts,
cakes and sandwiches) at his studio under the title The
Store. In 1964 the Pop ar tists of New York moreover
organized their own supermarket in Manhattans Bianchini
Galler y. Here, for less than fifty dollars (which was
relatively expensive in comparison to similar consumer
items in a supermarket, yet ver y inexpensive in
comparison to prices for works sold by these ar tists in
galleries) those interested could purchase, among other
things, turkey by Roy Lichtenstein, ar tificially colored
fruit by Rober t Watts, Campbells soup cans by Warhol
(now available in a three-dimensional version) and cans
of beer by Jasper Johns.

Booming Business
The playfulness displayed by Pop ar tists in their
embracement of commerce was gone by the 1980s. The
reality is, of course, more complex, but the recent
historiography of ar t makes the following assessment:
the ar t world had become wear y of all the serious,

impersonal, intellectualist and, above all, unmarketable

ar t that came after Pop Ar t. Conceptual ar t, per formance
and minimal ar t had to clear the way for exuberant twodimensional canvases that one could get drunk on
again, to use the words of Walter Benjamin. Concept and
criticism were out, beauty was in and saleability was
okay again. Germany promoted its neo-expressionist
painters, such as Georg Baselitz, Rainer Fetting and Jrg
Immendor f f. Italy saw the rise of the trans-avant-garde
with its three Cs: Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and
Enzo Cucchi. Representing the United States were,
among others, the commodity sculptors Jef f Koons,
Haim Steinbach, Meyer Vaisman and Ashley Bicker ton,

86

neo-geo painters such as Peter Halley and the postmodern

ar tists David Salle and Eric Fischl.
These were the days when successful ar tists such
as Julian Schnabel could be spotted cruising through
Palm Beach in a Bentley conver tible; when the nouveauriches of Wall Street and Hollywood would buy out
an entire exhibition before the opening; when lifestyle
magazines and tabloids were printing inter views with hip
ar tists; and when the quality of contemporar y ar t
was being expressed, more than ever before, in monetar y
terms. In 1989 the curators of New Yorks Whitney
Biennial characterized this ar t world as follows:
We have moved into a situation where wealth is the only
agreed-upon arbiter of value. Capitalism has over taken
contemporar y ar t, quantifying and reducing it to
the status of a commodity. Ours is a system adrift in
mor tgaged goods and obsessed with accumulation,
where the spectacle of ar t consumption has been played
out in a public forum geared to the journalistic
hyperbole. 44

Many ar tists did not oppose this spectacle of the market,

but thrived on it, in any case as long as their careers
were booming. Only a few disenchanted figures, among
them Sandro Chia, could be heard:
Today works of ar t imitate and are inspired by the
economy. The economy has itself become the work of
ar t, acquiring all the qualities a work of ar t should have:
pitilessness, ruthlessness, cynicism, grandiosity,

87
40 Jef f Koons, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, 1980-1986
Jef f Koons

communicativeness, abstraction. Economic systems and

economic values rule the ar t world. 45

Several years earlier before this statement was made,

Chias work had been dumped on the ar t market by the
British adver tising magnate and influential collector
Charles Saatchi. This had a distrastrous ef fect on Chias
career.
Rob Scholte, the only Dutch ar tist to be par t of this
superstar scene during the eighties, had no qualms
about posing for a large adver tisement of the pension
insurer Zwitserleven. Beneath it were Scholtens words
(in Dutch): What Im especially after is to take the
predictability out of ar t. This adver tisement is a nice
example of that. When Scholte, like many other ar tists
of his generation, had been given a retrospective
exhibiton in a major museum (in this case Boijmans van
Beuningen in Rotterdam) at much too young an age,
he had the annual ar t-ratings from the German business
magazine Capital printed on the inside flap of the

88

catalogue. On this list of the top hundred most expensive

and hottest ar tists in the world, Scholte was number
ninety-six. The name of the exhibition? How to be a Star.
And that was irony.
On this commercial scene the character of imaginar y
economics changed dramatically. Ar tists who rose
to fame during the eighties seemed obsessed with the
workings of the market economy and made frequent
reference to that in their works. Steinbach incorporated
his own bank statements into some works. Bicker ton
placed a digital counter in one of his sculptures; this
was set, during a galler y exhibition, at the sale price of
the work and, after being sold, began to run so fast that
it roughly kept up with the increase in the investment
value of the work. Scholte produced blow-ups of the
original design of Monopoly money from 1935 and made
for ty-two screen prints from these. In these works any
commentar y, criticism or parody of the (ar t) economy in
which these ar tists par ticipated can scarcely be
discerned. The quality of ar t was indeed being measured
in terms of the rising economic value of the work; ar tists
did have economic success; the power monopolies
of a select group of collectors and ar t dealers, based on
purchasing power, did actually structure the ar t world.
These ar tworks resigned themselves to a laissez-faire
ideology in which a distinction between cultural goods,
status symbols and investment objects was no longer a
possibility. 46
Motivated by self-interest, utility maximization and
profit, the makers of these works emulated homo
economicus. The critical intentions of commodity
sculpture, insofar as these were present, were corrupt
because the ar tists concerned complied per fectly with
the mechanisms which they criticized. They were, to use
the words of Peter Brger, like prisoners who fall in love
with their prison and its guards, thriving on media
attention that came their way and seeming all too eager
to play the commercial game of the ar t world. 47 Critic Hal
Foster spoke aptly about this affirmative form of
imaginar y economics as the ar t of cynical reason.
When Peter Halley paints austere geometric patterns
in bright colors, he does of course build upon
constructivist ar t from the thir ties; the consumer goods
that Steinbach places along side each other on a


40

89

pedestal obviously have to do with minimalism and

conceptual ar t; and when Jef f Koons places Hoover
Deluxe vacuum cleaners in display cases, serially and
professionally, with even fluorescent lighting from the
inside, he undoubtedly refers to Duchamps readymades
and to Pop Ar t. But the playfulness of American
Supermarket or the peculiar listlessness of Oldenburgs
sculptures gives way, in the work Koons, Steinbach and
Halley, to an exaltedness, humorlessness and an inability
to put things in perspective. And whereas Duchamp
turned his back on ar t practically once and for all after
producing his readymades, thereby largely managing to
preser ve their ef fect, Koons took the ver y opposite
approach. Before his career as an ar tist began, he was
a stock broker on Wall Street. Through endless
repetition, the freshness of Duchamps readymade began
to wane in the hands of Koons. Duchamp commands a
sense of uneasiness; Koons of fers comfor t. Commodity
sculpture, postmodern painting and neo-geo ar t blatantly
circulate in a commercial setting, proudly representing
a system that revolves around an endless cycle of
stimulating and satisfying acquisitive desires. This form
of imaginar y economics wants us to forget that we can
envisage a world dif ferent from the consumer society
which forms its own natural habitat. It seems determined
to eradicate any tension that may exist between ar t and
the capitalist economy.

90
41 Christian Janowski, Point of Sale (video still), 2002. Cour tesy
Kloster felde, Berlin and Maccarone Inc., New York

42 Christian Janowski, Point of Sale (video still), 2002. Cour tesy

Kloster felde, Berlin and Maccarone Inc., New York

4
The Culturalization of
Economics
With the star t of the nineties came an implosion of the
ar t market that had been a breeding ground for
affirmative imaginar y economics. Careers of superstar
ar tists were brought to a halt as quickly as they had
begun, and the prices of their work fell. Commodity
sculpture and neo-geo painting vanished from the scene,
at least for the time being. Proof that ar t and the
economy ultimately have nothing to do with each other?
Tentative proof at most, for the commercialization of
the ar t world during the eighties would be succeeded by
its opposite during the nineties: the cultural shift within
the economy. Various books such as The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society by Daniel Bell, The Experience
Economy by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, The Network
Society by Manuel Castells and The Age of Access by
Jeremy Rifkin suggest that we live in a postmodern,
cultural economy whose character dif fers fundamentally
from that of the modern, industrial economy. The domain
of the economy insofar as that can be identified as
a separate domain has, to put it in a nutshell, adopted

the qualitative logic of ar t. As Rifkin says, Machine

images like efficiency, productivity, utility, deliverability
and computability are falling by the wayside, replaced by

41,42

92

43,44

theatrical images of cultural production. And: Concepts,

ideas and images not things are the real items of
value in the new economy. Wealth is no longer vested in
physical captial but rather in human imagination and
creativity. 48
Imaginar y economics from the nineties examine
these cultural-economic changes. In Point of Sale (2002),
for instance, Christian Jankowski creates a por trait of
his own ar t dealer, Michelle Maccarone, and the owner
of an electronics store, charmingly named Kunst,
located beneath the galler y on Manhattans Lower East
Side. In the video the two respond to questions, posed
by a management advisor, about their business
philosophies, their backgrounds, and the aims of their
businesses. In the video the galler y owner, however,
is speaking the words of the electronics salesman and
the electronics salesman those of the galler y owner.
While the viewer implicity assumes, at the outset that
the world of an electronics salesman and that of a
galler y owner are fundamentally dif ferent, as the video
progresses it becomes apparent just how small the
dif ferences happen to be on a microsituational level.
The Austrian ar tists Dejanov & Heger caused a stir
with a similar investigation of the borderline between ar t
and the economy. In 1999 the two ar tists struck a deal
with the German car-manufacturer BMW to produce
publicity for the company for one year. During that year
all of their exhibitions were centered around BMW
(adver tising material, cars, lifestyle items) and,
in catalogues and magazines, the company was given
publicity space that had been intended for Dejanov &
Heger. In exchange for this the ar tists received a BMW
roadster, type Z3, and the company covered all costs
connected with the installation of their exhibitions. In the
exhibition Plan B, held at the Amsterdam exhibition
space De Appel, the ar tists displayed adver tising posters
of the Z3 Roadster, for instance, while visitors were
given the oppor tunity to do a test-drive with this car during
the official opening of the exhibition. In Munich this
agreement led to an outright clash, when Dejanov &
Heger allowed BMW in 1999 to set up a sales booth at

the established exhibition space Kunstverein and invited

sales representatives of BMW to come and recommend
their cars there. Par t of the museum staf f was so
of fended by this that the space of Dejanov & Heger was
temporarily vacated.
Why did the project, which Dejanov & Heger called
Quite normal luxur y, give rise to such fierce opposition?
Because it links two social domains which, cer tainly
since the beginning of the nineteenth centur y, have been
sharply divided from an ideological point of view. These

93

ar tists seem to throw away ar ts autonomy and surrender

themselves to a domain which knows only one value,
that is the value of money. One could argue, however,
that the museum staf f in Munich carried out a rearguard
strategy, ultimately ignoring the issue raised by Quite
normal luxur y: what remains of that division between ar t
and the economy other than a handful of rituals and
symbols? After all, nineteenth-centur y society and its
modern industrial economy from which the avant-garde
wished to escape is long gone. In the postmodern
economy there are few people still concerned with the
physical production of useful, functional goods. Instead
the economy has shifted rapidly in recent decades
toward a type of production with which ar tists have a
greater affinity: the production of symbols.
For in the postmodern economy it is not material,
but symbolic values that are consumed. Explosively
grown marketing depar tments need to transform ever y
product into a brand and, by means of refined adver tising
campaigns, to ensure that consumers immediately
associate a product with a par ticular lifestyle. In a
society where traditional instruments of social distinction,
such as class and profession, no longer function, such
brands make it possible for consumption to assume all
sor ts of social functions. Attractive design and refined
packaging fur ther contribute to the consumers feeling
that products are tailored to his or her individual
desires. Aesthetic considerations are therefore among
the most impor tant in the production of consumer goods
such as the Z3 Roadster. Anyone who drives a BMW
wants to say something to his fellow man by doing so.
Superficial as this may be, it is a form of self-expression.
Quite normal luxur y suggests, in shor t, that the
economy now runs on cultural values, on attention and

94

inspiration, on image and identity. In this economy

ar tists succeed in finding employment as photographers
or ar t directors for ad firms and marketing depar tments.
Some of them moreover manage to maintain their
positions in the field of ar t and their integrity as
autonomous ar tists as did the Dutch ar tist Inez van
Lamsweerde, maker of manipulated, somewhat
disturbing fashion photographs.
In this postmodern, cultural economy businesses
dare to call themselves ar tists. Some of them, including
the Italian companies Name Dif fusion and Tecnotest
(maker of testing equipment for automobile garages)
were brought together in 1993 with the exhibition
Business Ar t at the Groninger Museum.49 Conversely,
ar tists present themselves in various degrees of
seriousness as businesses. In an ar t world that became
despecialized years ago, the dividing line with respect
to other social domains is, in any case, blurred:
ar tists have entered other fine-ar t disciplines such as
music, film, dance and theater without problems,

95
43 Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Quite Normal Luxur y, 19992001. Cour tesy Air de Paris, Paris

44 Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Quite Normal Luxur y, 19992001. Cour tesy Air de Paris, Paris

constantly seeking the limits of ar t and extending them

far ther outward. Ar tists such as Alan Kaprow had
propagated as early as the seventies that ar t should

96

simply disappear altogether, become par t of life, continue

to exist as un-ar t. The un-ar tist could become, for
instance, an account executive, an ecologist, a stunt
rider, a politician, a beach bum, albeit one with a slight
abnormality.50
The economy of fers excellent oppor tunities for this
disappearing act. After having produced several
autonomous works at the end of the eighties, the
American ar tist Seymour Likely (soon revealed to be the
working name under which three Amsterdam ar tists
Alder t Mantje, Ronald Hooft and Ido Vunderink traded in
mystification) emerged as an entrepreneur. In 1991
Seymour Likely designed the house style of the Amsterdam basketball team the Graydon Canadians. The shir ts
of the players were adorned with depictions of Canadian
bank notes (Graydon, the teams sponsor, is a debtcollection agency). Displayed on the Canadian bills are a
photograph of the British monarch, a basketball,
Seymour Likelys signature and his motto conceptual
continuity. The fake money was also used as currency in
the form of admission tickets. In 1992 Seymour Likely
opened a store, Seymour Likely Hardware, in the
chic Amsterdam shopping mall Magna Plaza. The space
functioned as a Gesamtkunstwerk but also as an
operating store where screen prints and other multiples
of fellow ar tists could be purchased. For this they
adver tized with the text: Buy this. Things you dont want,
things you dont need, things you cant af ford.
Seymour Likelys most successful project was the
opening of the Seymour Likely Bar on the Nieuwezijds
Voorburgwal in Amsterdam. According to the ar tists, the
bar was an ar twork in the tradition of Edward Kienholzs
Beaner y at the citys Stedelijk Museum. The ins and
outs of the bar were described as follows by Mantje, Hooft
and Vunderink: With the caf we are stepping out of
the sacred atmosphere of museums and galleries and are
now defining ourselves in a totally dif ferent context.
() Ever y day, in fact, we notice that we are situated
beyond the ar t world. Now we have dealings with beer
dealers, representatives for gambling machines and even

someone who replaces the bathroom fresheners in all

the Amsterdam cafs ever y month. The ar t idiom no
longer applies in this world. 51

Dealing with Uncer tainty

97

Aside from role-switching between ar tists and businesses,

affirmative imaginar y economics also gave rise to
strategic alliances between ar tists and businesses. A
group of ar tists was swept along in the current which the
labor market generated for computer scientists and
internet designers during the second half of the nineties.
Stephen Johnson, writer of the popular book Inter face
Culture, even claimed that the design of digital
inter faces would be the new ar t form of the twenty-first
centur y. Distinctions between ar t, technology and
society are supposedly as irrelevant for the inventors of
new Apple-computer software and hardware as they were
for the builders of medieval cathedrals. 52
During the nineties some ar tists and businessmen
also expected ar t to be helpful in bringing about
an innovative, reflective and change-oriented business
culture. Some businesses substituted their usual
company outing with an afternoon devoted to sculpting,
music-making or painting. Apar t from being directed at
team-building, those activities were also intended to set
of f processes of change. Some ar tists moreover acted
as advisors to top managers, par ticipated in
brainstorming sessions in the business community or
gave lectures that were meant to inspire and motivate
large groups of employees.
In 2000, for instance, the Dutch ar tist Marjorieke
Glaudemans brought together, in duos, nineteen
managers and nineteen ar tists.53 The dialogues in which
they engaged were mainly about discovering similarities
and dif ferences between the two spheres of ar t and
economy. When one ar tist remarked, We seduce
rhetorically, we make the viewer enthusiastic with our
visual language, a manager realized, Hey, actually we
managers do that, too. The ar tists, in turn, thought they
could learn from the team spirit of the business world.
With us its: the more ambitious, the more invisible, said
one manager.

The originally British ar tist Paul Perr y, who advised

information technology company Triple P and others,
made the following obser vation about alliances between
ar t and the business world:
Its cer tainly possible to look at some companies as ar t
or as ar tworks in themselves. At hear t Im a McLuhanist;
I believe that the form is more impor tant than the content,
that the form actually says more than the content. The
medium is cer tainly the message. Companies are
nothing other than forms or systems to generate wealth.
As long as their form, their system, is malleable we can
do ar t together and find new ways to generate wealth. 54

98

Major research centers for information technology, such

as the XEROX Palo Alto Research Center in California,
organized their own ar tist-in-residence programs. There,
surrounded by technicians, computer scientists and
marketing exper ts, ar tists were expected to contribute
to innovative processes that eventually would or would
not lead to commercially viable products. Other,
predominantly new media companies housed ar tists in
what were called incubators, where they were to initiate
creative, relatively chaotic processes not directly aimed
at practical results.
The idea behind such strategic alliances is that
innovation takes place on the dividing line between two
cultures, ways of thinking or perspectives on reality.
The contrast between the two can be seen perhaps
somewhat caricaturally in terms coined by the French
anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss. In his work,
Lvi-Strauss made a distinction between the bricoleur
(the handyman) and the ingnieur (the engineer). The
model of the bricoleur, rooted in the ar ts, is associative
and interactive. A bricoleur makes due with what he has
and takes an ad hoc approach to solving problems, that
is to say one without a predetermined plan. Should
setbacks occur, they are not interpreted merely as such
but likewise as events from which one can learn. He
could also be referred to as an explorer who, amazed yet
driven, attempts to live up to his plans. The ingenieur, on
the other hand, plans his activities meticulously and
goes to work only when a project has been mapped out in
detail with a step-by-step plan, a budget, specifications,

etc. He has difficulty with unforeseen circumstances,

and setbacks can quickly lead to the failure of a plan. 55
Companies that have a static engineers culture could

99

therefore learn from the nonconformist ar tist/ bricoleur.

Here, the idea is that confrontation, the element of
confusion and the need to distance oneself from the
daily routine do force one to reflect. With their
unconventional approaches, ar tists would moreover be
more able (than consultants, for instance) to identify and
clarify a problem. And that is something which businesses
operating in a constantly changing environment can
cer tainly use. For technology is being transformed ever y
day; in the postmodern economy the consumers
taste is unpredictable; both suppliers and buyers, for
many companies, are sought worldwide; and formulas for
success, if they exist at all, seem to change by the
minute. Uncer tainty is a fact of life, and entrepreneurship
and innovative power are needed to deal with it. Actually,
if we rely on nothing other than a pursuit of cer tainty and
mathematical calculations, entrepreneurship will become
extinct, the economist and, as a member of
Bloomsbur y Group, fer vent ar t lover John Maynard
Keynes argued in his principal work The General Theor y
of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
A contemporar y of Keynes, the Austrian economist
Joseph Schumpeter, says that a capitalist economy
develops by way of creative destruction: entrepreneurs
should be prepared to undermine structures and forms
of organization that were created in all fairness in the
past. With a cer tain amount of audacity and recklessness,
thought Schumpeter, they should dare to break through
existing routines and traditions, for in a changing
environment these routines only stand in the way of
innovation. Economists in the tradition of Schumpeter,
referred to as the Austrian school, fur thermore argue
that entrepreneurs ought to be continually on the aler t
for changes in their surroundings and able to discern in
those changes a profit potential unseen by others. For
businesses, this means maintaining an open
organization culture, so that they are able to respond to
changing environmental factors. This has even greater
impor tance in a global economy, which to an increasing
degree conveys the idea of being disordered. 56
Not only for the business world but also for ar tists,

100
45 Orgacom, FHV Corporate *inc-21*Proximity*Signum*XSAGA,
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, 2001. Photograph: Edo Kuipers

the nineties seemed to be the right time to look for

par tners beyond ones own domain. Like the business
community, ar tists seemed to be contending with
outdated institutions, ideas and routines that were no
longer meeting their own requirements. Many had had
enough of making ar t that could be enjoyed only by a
small group of insiders. A source of frustration was that
the world of contemporar y ar t is more inclined to hinder
rather than encourage a dialogue with other social
domains. Moreover, the abundant visual culture in which
ar tists work can have a paralyzing ef fect on them. In
return for autonomy, ar tists seem to have paid the price
by becoming marginalized, and for many this was too
high a price. For that reason ar tists like Alicia Framis,
Jeanne van Heeswijk and Otto Berchem attempted
to initiate a direct dialogue with the public outside the
context of established cultural institutions. 57
One of the domains which ar tists tried to enter was
the economy. Ar t magazine Metropolis M spoke of ar ts
new economy which, paradoxically enough, made it

possible for ar tists to relinquish the traditional ar t

market. The alternative for the ar t market was to be a
network economy, in which the cultupreneur forges
alliances inside and outside the ar t world and realizes
projects in the form of creative joint ventures as it
were.58 The slogan bring ar t back to life heard during

45

101

the seventies among critical ar tists who wished to close

the gap between ar t and society was brought out of
the closet again, though now in a context that had more
to do with the market than with Mar x.
Teike Asselbergs and Elias Tieleman, who together
make up the ar tists initiative Orgacom, are illustrative of
this cultupreneurship. Orgacom concentrates on the
visualization of organization cultures and the stimulation
of reflection on innovation, communication and creativity
within businesses. By commission or on its own
initiative, Orgacom enters into dialogues with a variety of
businesses and non-profit organizations. For a period of
time the two Asselbergs and/or Tieleman remain as
ar tists in residence within a business or organization,
where they conduct a kind of anthropological field work.
After that Orgacom constructs a range of images that
visualize or shed light on the problematics of the
business culture at hand. As such they wish to show that
meaningful associations between ar t and business are
possible and desirable. A car-leasing company, an
adver tising firm, a nursing facility and an employment
agency were among their clients. For creativity center De
Kubus in Lelystad, for instance, Orgacom tried to
improve business communication by launching a political
campaign: after Orgacom had held inter views with all
of the employees, Tieleman and Asselbergs designed,
for each of them, an election poster with a slogan to
match. The posters were then hung about in the
companys building, and as a result ever y employee
became a face. For an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum
Bureau Amsterdam, Orgacom went a step beyond this.
In order to shed light on the way in which Orgacom itself
was functioning, the ar tists invited a business where they
themselves had been ar tists in residence the
communications company FHV to the museum. FHV then
put together the entire exhibition, including billboards
and a PowerPoint presentations in which the workings of
Orgacom were explained.

The collaboration with employment agency Randstand,

for which Orgacom developed various scenarios of the
future, was so well received that Orgacom asked
Randstad to open a temporar y branch at the exhibition in
the Amsterdam ar tists initiative W139. Randstand
accepted the of fer, and for the duration of the exhibition
ar tists were able to register with the employment agency
for creative work in the business world. The idea was
that the business community would be wise to make use
of the creative potential of ar tists. The British ar tist
Rachel Baker, who also opened an employment agency
for ar tists during an exhibition on ar t and business at
Londons Institute of Contemporar y Ar t (1999), made
the following remark about this:
Ar tists are an underexploited human resource for the
modern workplace, and the workplace is an underexploited
resource for the modern ar tist () Managers are
realising the need to cultivate creativity and conviviality

102

to maximise profits since hard labor and long hours are

no longer guarantees of results. 59

Crisis Ar t
Business people are encouraged to be as creative as
possible. To me there is a kind of hypocrisy in the view
that ar tists are in a separate realm or that the corporate
structure is a separate world. To me they are completely
and utterly interconnected, said Carey Young, who
has investigated the relationship between ar t and the
business in various projects. 60 Ar t is supposedly a form
of doing business, and doing business a form of ar t.
Therefore they might as well merge entirely.
Critics, however, were not happy with the fact that
ar tists such as Young, Jankowski, Heger, Dejanov, Perr y,
Asselbergs and Tieleman were in their view
contributing to the sellout of ar t. Exemplar y of the
affirmative imaginar y economics of the nineties, the
exhibition Ar t & Economy at Hamburgs Deichtorhallen
took a beating in the media. According to Axel Lapp,
a critic for Ar t Monthly, the exhibition was mainly to be
interpreted as the campaign of a multinational,
which transforms all ar t into marketing (the exhibition

was financed and par tly organized by the German multinational Siemens). Curator and ar tist Louis Camnitzer
regretted the lack of ideological analysis and the
exhibitions resignation to the nonexistence of any
alternative to the capitalist economy in which ar tists
operate. And Peter Brger wrote, in a critical letter to the
Frankfur ter Allgemeine Zeitung, that the shown ar tists
arrived at no more than a form of mock criticism. The
exhibition demonstrated, in Brgers view, that the age
of social criticism had come to an end. And he lamented
that.61

103

Both Youngs optimism and Brgers defeatism are

misplaced, as there is not the slightest evidence of a
society in which delineations between various social
domains have ceased to exist, where ever ything is ar t as
well as business, where ever yone and no one is an
ar tist. More than that, the involved ar tists themselves
are, paradoxically enough, unable to do without a strict
division of the two realms. Despite their flir t with the
economy, they continue to build upon a traditional myth
of the ar tist. Young and others carr y on thanks to the
attention received from official, traditional institutions
such as ar t magazines, exhibition spaces and grant
providers. Whether their endeavors would last long in a
truly commercial arena remains uncer tain. Moreover the
interest that businesses have displayed for this
ar t seems to be par ticularly sensitive to the economic
climate: when times get tough, as in the late nineties
after the burst of the internet bubble, precisely such
ar tistic personnel are the first to be cut from the budget.
Secondly, with such projects the actual benefits to
the public are anything but clear. Dejanov & Heger were
given a spor ts car and a reputation; for the German
car manufacturer the added value is also evident. But the
public remains along the sidelines. For posters of the
Z3 Roadster, we can also go to any BMW dealer. The
public can therefore fall victim to the new alliance between
ar t and business. How often will this public be prepared
to hear that ar tists are inevitably facing economic
forces in their work, that ar t and the economy correspond
with each other or that innovation is not merely the
ar tists concern, before many walk away yawning?
Put briefly, the ar t of Dejanov & Heger is a form of
crisis ar t. Contemporar y ar t has lost its place in society,

and it is far from clear just where it will take root again
or, if that fails to occur, just how it will behave as an
uprooted field. That especially applies to ar tists who seek
the field of tension with the economy, for if the entire
economy is cultural, what is left for ar tists to do? Is it
not out of desperation that ar tists make such over tures
of friendship to businesses, their final move in an end
game which can only lead to a draw at best? The danger
of their affirmative approach is fur thermore that ar t
assumes an excessively ser vile stance with respect to a
realm that already holds a dominant position in Western
society. Does the economy really need the suppor t of
ar tists? Society is already so highly determined by the
pursuit of usefulness, efficiency and economic growth
that it may be better to preser ve a realm in which the
useless and the selfless prevail. The last chapter deals
with ar tists who attempt to safeguard these ver y aspects.

104

A Theory of Play

Let us go back to Tzanck Check just one more time. In

the previous chapters we have seen that the check, like
Duchamps other financial documents, has long wavered
back and for th between two antithetical interpretations:
criticism and affirmation. But it remains to be seen
whether these interpretations indeed do justice to what
actually happens in those works. Instead of the official,
invoking words In God we trust we read such texts as
moustique domestique demistock; rather than the
usual serious-looking por trait of a bank director or head
of state, we see a photograph of Duchamps own face
covered in shaving cream; rather than a lofty banking
institution, it is a tooth bank, a mushroom society or a
Banque Mona Lisa which acts as the financier. The Mona
Lisa Bank moreover allows Duchamp to write checks
for unlimited amounts. The world of money can be toyed
with and market values can be ridiculed, Duchamp
seems to say. Is it truly necessar y to take the capitalist
economy as seriously as the economists who embrace it
and the ar t critics who loathe it just as passionately?

And let us look again at the decision which placed

Duchamp in an unfavorable light: to conver t his original
readymades into cash by producing them anew with
the help of ar t dealer Schwarz. Though Duchamp may
have had commercial motives in doing that, he seemed
to be provoking the implications rather than avoiding
them, and the negative reactions from those around him
were by no means a surprise. Thus the response to
American painter Douglas Gorsline, who had written a
letter asking Duchamp to sign a bottle rack for him:
In Milan I have just made a contract with Schwar z,
authorizing him to make an edition (8 replicas) of all my
few readymades, including the por te bouteille. I have
therefore pledged myself not to sign anymore readymades
to protect this edition. But signature or no signature,
your find has the same metaphysical value as any other
readymade, [it] even has the advantage to have no
commercial value. 62

106

As entangling and strangling as these words of Duchamp

may be, they subscribe to the idea that the ar tist is
playing an ongoing game with the market. At the end of
his life, it was entirely unclear what that signature
whether it was on the readymades or the four financial
documents actually had meant; all onlookers were and
are left behind in confusion. That is why his friend Max
Ernst, who initially believed like other criticasters that
the Schwarz af fair had compromised Duchamps
reputation, later began to wonder whether this af fair had
not simply been another attempt to throw public opinion,
to confuse minds, to deceive admirers, to encourage
his imitators by his bad example, etc. When Ernst asked
Duchamp for an explanation about this, the latter
answered with a smile. 63

Magical Transformations
After Duchamp came an undercurrent of ar tists who
neither affirmed nor criticized the economy, but rather
decided to play a game with it. Their play bears a great
resemblance to what the Situationists of the sixties
called detournement: processes that disrupt the

107

46

ever yday course of events, throw sand into the gears of

the machine and draw people away from their usual
way of thinking and acting. Imagination, poetr y and ar t
were to rise to power according to the Situationists.
The economy of profit would give way to an economy of
pleasure, and pseudo-needs were to move aside for
genuine desires.
Take, for example, the work of Parisian ar tist Yves
Klein who, with tongue in cheek, claimed the exclusive
use of the color IKB (International Klein Blue), an actual
trademark. At the beginning of his career as an ar tist
(which incidentally had to compete with his persistent
wish to become a full-fledged, professional judoka) Klein
published the beautiful monograph Yves Peinture
(1953), in which a series of monochrome paintings by
him were shown. The provenance of each work was
listed, and the catalogue was provided with a sound ar thistorical introduction. Both would undoubtedly have
been a guarantee for ar tistic as well as economic
success, but after a time it appeared that Klein never
actually produced the paintings shown in the catalogue.
They existed only on paper.
Several years later, in 1957, Klein had a solo
exhibition, titled Lepoca bl (The Blue Epoch), in a Milan
galler y. Though all of the ar tworks were identical, the
price being asked for each work varied considerably. But
of course the prices were all dif ferent, explained the
ar tist: Thats how I look for the true value of the
painting. The fact that people were indeed prepared to
pay dif ferent prices for apparently identical works was
proof that the true, non-material value actually did var y.
The climax as well as the end of Kleins play on ar tistic
and economic value came with Ritual rules for the
transfer of zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility. Klein
accepted no money, but on payment of a small amount
of gold one could purchase a piece of immaterial
pictorial sensibility. Or rather air. The buyer received a
cer tificate in return for this. And in the presence of the
buyer, Klein threw half of the gold into the Seine. 64
The Belgian ar tist Marcel Broodthaers had a similar
fondness of magical transformations. He added a
financial section to his ephemeral yet famous Muse
dAr t Moderne, Depar tement des Aigles, which
transformed gold bars into works of ar t. The gold bars

108
46 Yves Klein, Transfer of zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility,
1962, Paris. Photograph: Harr y Shunk Yves Klein, c/o Beeldrecht
Amsterdam 2004

47,48,49

were numbered and cer tified (by such means as a stamp

of an eagle insignia). The contract that accompanied
each sale determined that the price of ever y kilo of gold
that left the museum as a work of ar t would amount to
twice the current price of gold. The Italian painter Piero
Manzoni also liked to see gold, but then for his own
excrement. In 1961 he filled nine little cans with this and
furnished each of them with a label on which the
following is printed: Ar tists Shit. Contents: 30 gr net.
Freshly preser ved. Produced and tinned in May 1961.
No one is cer tain as to what the cans actually contain.
At about the same time, Pieter Engels was playing a
game with the economy in the Netherlands. Engels
represented the Netherlands both at the Venice Biennial
and at documenta in Kassel, and presented himself as
the great restorer: he sawed furniture into pieces
(removing legs, bisecting spindles and seats) and then
put these back together again. But he did this with
hinges, which caused the objects of furniture to collapse
like newborn calves. Engels Products Organization (EPO),

109

47 Pieter Engels, Golden fiction 1968 (Price of a modern ar t piece),

detail. Cour tesy Pieter Engels

110
48 Pieter Engels, Invitation to EPO show, Galerie 845, 1966,
Amsterdam. Cour tesy Pieter Engels

49 Pieter Engels, EPO cat. a: restored piece of furniture, 1964.

Cour tesy Pieter Engels

as he called his ar t enterprise established in 1964, had

a number of other friendly of fers in store for anyone and
ever yone, including the wonder events. ENGELS will
damage your car for a little as 25,-; ENGELS will damage
your car nicely for 100,-. EPO instituted a cultural prize
for plagiarism. The winner had to hand over 250 guilders
to the director of EPO; the winner of an honorable mention
was set back for 1000 guilders. To Marga Klomp, the
Dutch minister of culture of that time, Engels promised
on April 5, 1971 that he would never produce ar t again
for the rest of his life provided that the state would pay
him twenty-five million guilders.
In an inter view with Carel Blotkamp for the Dutch
weekly Vrij Nederland, Engels gave the following comment
on these absurdist projects:
Of course I just love that language of adver tising and
commercial of fers. You may consider that language really
dead, but I actually find it pretty lively. Behind all of

111

those terms and clichs is a cer tain feeling, restrained

by the straightjacket of commercial lingo. I like writing
these kinds of sentences: Engels will cut through
any valid bank note for 10,-; Engels will breathe air for
10,- per bottle; assor ted drinks and tasty snacks
available at the entrance. As a special attraction, the
oppor tunity to speak with Engels is being of fered at the
exceptionally low price of 5,- per min., also applies to
the press. Boy do I like that.

The Economy as Fiction

But those were the sixties, the days of flower power,
student protests, Provo, the sexual revolution, the
alternative Dutch movement of the Kabouters (literally:
gnomes) and mushrooms. Since then society has become
more businesslike, the economy has been placed on a
pedestal, efficiency has become the guiding principle,
the welfare state has been dismantled, a large par t of
the government privatized, and the Kabouter has been
coaxed into buying stocks.
This economic system is so intent on achieving
growth that it has become a caricature of itself. European
government leaders are opting, within the Lisbon

112

50 Surasi Kusoiwong, 1 Euro market shop (Shop till you fly), Airpor t
Frankfur t. Photograph: Norber t Miguletz. Cour tesy Schirn Kunsthalle
Frankfur t

113

51 Matthieu Laurette, The freebie king, 2001. Cour tesy Matthieu

Laurette

strategy, to achieve a higher rate of growth than the U.S.

before 2010 without being able to explain why that
is so necessar y. Managers are stirring their employees
on to success so fer vently that fraudulent practices

114

51

ensue look at Enron, Ahold, Parmalat or Shell and the

result is ultimately the collapse of the company in
question. Investors are so keen on a high return that
they follow each other like sheep when buying stock in
businesses that have shown little or no profit. The
outcome: stock prices first rise incredibly fast and then
fall just as quickly when the sheep realize that there is
no validity to the sky-high prices.
All of that invites play. Some contemporar y ar tists
consequently have a ball with the often obscure and, on
fur ther consideration, not terribly rational way in which
value is generated in the economy. They ridicule the
modern myths on which the economy runs (permanent
growth, heightened efficiency, accumulation of wealth).
The strategy of these ar tists is to imitate and parody
economic processes, taking them out of their context and
thereby revealing their absurdity. In his project El gran
trueque (The Big Exchange) French ar tist Matthieu
Laurette, for example, pokes fun at the fixation of
businesses on profit-making. By resor ting, like a maniac,
to the act of exchanging the ar tist aims at the destruction
of value. With the budget for an exhibition in Bilbao,
Laurette purchased an automobile. He then of fered,
during a show on Spanish television, to exchange the car
for an object that viewers could present to him by
telephone. The person who of fered the most valuable
object to Laurette could call himself the new owner of
the car. After a series of such exchange transactions,
Laurette eventually ended up with a set of cheap
glasses, which he put up for sale on the internet auction
site eBay. As such Laurette implicitly casts doubt upon
societys irrational and scarcely questioned desire to
keep on growing.
For another project Laurette dedicated himself to the
writing of slogans, the clipping of coupons, to moneyback guarantees and all sor ts of other vulgar phenomena
so abundant in consumer society. With the products
accumulated in this manner, Laurette was apparently able
to get by on almost nothing. He then went on tour with
this project, appearing on the equally vulgar talk shows

of European commercial television in order to promote

his own form of consumerism. The aim: a jolly revolution
of clipping, pasting consumers.
Other ar tists take little notice of the laws of supply
and demand and establish their own economic systems.
They transform markets into amazing celebrations and,
in passing, declare war on big business. The rules
that apply to their own economic systems are arbitrar y
and idiosyncratic, and seem to lead to nothing at all. The
Thai ar tist Surasi Kusolwong, for instance, has been
staging shameless and chaotic shopping events over the
past few years. For these he meticulously arranges
color ful, cheap, often plastic objects such as shopping
bags, dolls, beach balls or Japanese comic strip figures
on long tables. Kusolwong purchases these objects

115

50

52

himself, specifically for that purpose, from street vendors

in Bangkok. Then he assigns a uniform price one dollar
or a thousand lire, for instance to all of the goods,
regardless of the cost price that he paid himself. When
the installation is finished, Kusolwong tries to tempt
masses of people into his market. Among the locations
were Pariss Palais de Tokyo, the marketplace of the
medieval Tuscan village Casole dElsa and the airpor t of
Frankfur t. Bombarded by Asiatic disco music and his
own sales pitches that he screams through a megaphone
in English or in his native language, visitors are then
urged to buy his knickknacks. By lowering the prices as
the number of remaining objects decreases, Kusolwong
moreover simulates the frantic aspects of traditional
markets.65
Another form of play can be seen with the many mock
companies that ar tists have been setting up in recent
years. They poke fun at the extensive symbolic
apparatus intended to provide a modern business with
prestige: the well-cut suit and tie, the fancy dark-blue car
with driver, the impersonal office building, the slick
logo and house style. The Japanese brothers Nobumichi
and Masamichi Tosa, for example, run an electronics
store with the name Maywa Denki (named after an actual
business which their father once had). Dressed in
company suits, they give per formances that have the
look of product demonstrations. The handmade
products, which Maywa Denki also of fers on its website,
include totally useless Nonsense Machines furnished

116
52

56

53,54,55

Nobumichi Tosa, Maywa Denki Store, 2004

with fish motifs, self-operating tap-dance shoes and

a line of idiosyncratic, previously nonexistent musical
instruments.
Fabrice Hyber ts business Unlimited Responsibility
is specialized in the design of prototypes of functioning
objects (POFs); visitors to his exhibitions are invited to
draw up test repor ts of them. Examples of his inventions
include plastic tupper ware containers conver ted into
babushkas, a prothesis for a sixth finger, clothing made
from cybersponge, a square soccer ball and a painted
tree. Maria Anna Parolin of Parolin Products picks up
tree leaves, packages them (XL, L, M, or S), gives them
a bar code or a serial number and then sells them for
the uniform price of $19.99. For another line of Parolin
Products, which involves leaves as well, the ar tist
provides the following explanation:
Inspired by the beauty of natural imper fections (e.g. the
pattern of insect-eaten leaves, the randomness of decay)
the current project engages with contemporar y societys

117
53 Maria Anna Parolin, Parolin Products Drawing Series, 2000.
Cour tesy Maria Anna Parolin

54 Maria Anna Parolin, Parolin Products Nature Series, 1999.

Cour tesy Maria Anna Parolin

fascination with aesthetic standards and design

consciousness. (...) What does our desire for the per fect
object say about our relationship to contemporar y life
and conceptions of the natural world? We all know that
the misshapen, malformed and spotted apple is usually
the sweetest in the bunch. 66

118

57

The mock business Ingold Airlines has greater ambitions:

to head for the skies. The airline company founded by
German ar tist Res Ingold has a good-looking website
with extensive information on its origins, annual repor ts,
a description of the fleet, a slogan (A pleasure to fly), a
description of its stock-market launch and a list of
worldwide suppor ters. Some of these happen to be
cultural institutions. Ingold Airlines is not entirely fictitious
however. During the exhibition Business Ar t at the
Groninger Museum (1993) it was possible, for a small
fee, to take a ride in a helicopter with this airline
company. But where the line between reality and fiction
actually falls is difficult to say.
In the Netherlands, the deceased ar tist Ser vaas ran
a fish company, Int. Fi$h-handel Ser vaas & Zn, with
the mission statement the development of variety within
the language of commerce through the use of market
strategies and marketing systems for the purpose of fish,
the smell of fish, as well as the production and trade of
corresponding accessories. In the context of the
project de zee huilt (the sea cries) in 1996, Ser vaas
proclaimed the sea a work of ar t and then sold hectoliters
of seawater for fifty guilders. Half of the profit went to
Greenpeace. He also endeavored to market all sor ts of
fish products, such as ten-liter cans of fish air, drinkable
fish water and fish gas for cars.
Less innocent is the game played by Swiss mimicr y
business/ ar tists initiative Etoy, which carried out
hijackings in 1996 by infiltrating frequently used internet
browsers, such as Lycos, Infoseek and Altavista. Those
who typed in a popular search term, such as Porsche
or another brand name, ran a considerable risk of
running into a hidden link to the Etoy website among the
top ten search results. And by clicking incidentally on
that link, one would be faced with the message:
ON THE SEARCH FOR PORSCHE YOU HAVE BEEN

119
55 Maria Anna Parolin, Parolin Products Eaten Leaves Series, 2003.
Cour tesy Maria Anna Parolin

56 Fabrice Hyber t, POF no. 3, Swing in mint green. Cour tesy Fabrice
Hyber t

120

57 Etoy, 6 etoy.CORE-AGENTS, the crew that established the etoy.NIPPON-BRANCHE in Tokyo to enter the asia market Hiroshi Masuyama,
2001

KIDNAPPED! YOU ARE HOSTAGE NO. 1,646,709 SINCE

31.3.96 HIJACKED BY THE ORGANISATION etoy.

In 1999 Etoy took up a battle against the on-line toy

company whose name dif fers from that of the ar tists
initiative by only one letter: Etoys. Etoys, which at that
time had a market value of eight billion dollars, claimed
that its customers became confused when they
accidentally ended up on the website of the ar tists
initiative Etoy and were faced there with content that is
supposedly unacceptable in a civilized society. Etoy
pretended to be per fectly innocent, however, and only
added to the confusion by re-naming itself etoy.
CORPORATION. The ar tists adopted the jargon of
e-commerce and referred to themselves as early movers,
internet star tups and market leaders. Fur thermore
they handed out shares, accompanied by the inevitable
disclaimer:

121

etoy.SHARE is a revolutionar y ar t product of the etoy.

CORPORATION. This product does not follow the rules of
ordinar y financial markets. Investing in etoy is a high-risk
ar t operation.(...) Exper ts do not recommend the etoy.
SHARE as safe investment for retirement pensions.

After the ar tists had turned down an of fer by the toy

company to buy the name of the website for $516,000,
Etoys took legal action. At that point Etoy mobilized the
internet community, ar tists, journalists and other
sympathizers to wage a toywar: the ar tists initiative
called on them to boycott Etoys, to bombard the public
relations depar tment of the toy company with letters
of complaint or to influence public opinion in other ways.
Ar ticles about the lawsuit appeared in The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.
Despite the fact that the ar tists initiative was
established long before the toy company, Etoys won the
cour t case, which meant that Etoy could no longer use
its website. Eventually, however, Etoys reconsidered the
matter, par tly due to the negative publicity. 67 By that
time the internet bubble had popped, and the business
was heading for bankruptcy. When it was all over,
the ar tists initiative proudly announced on its website:

Within two months the eToys Inc. stock (NASDAQ:ETYS)

dropped from $67 (the day the battle star ted) to $15
(the day eToys Inc. finally dropped the case). TOYWAR
was the most expensive per formance in ar t histor y: $4.5
billion dollars.

A shot in the dark

122

The economy that emerges with all of these examples of

playful imaginar y economics is a human economy. It
does not obey the harsh laws of the market whatever
those may be but allows itself to be molded to ones
own desires and needs. This economy allows people to
set up businesses in order to realize their dreams, to
create their own monetar y systems or to conjure up value
from nothingness. These alternative economic systems
are not necessarily rational. It is quite possible that
the newly made money is not wor th anything, that one
cannot fly with the airline company, that nothing useable
can be acquired on the market, or that restoration
activities fail to put something back together again.
The fact that imagination and frivolity are empowered
in this form of imaginar y economics does not, however,
exclude the possibility of raising fundamental questions
that lead to a better understanding of economic
processes. To quote Johan Huizinga, author of the classic
in cultural histor y Homo Ludens: play can ver y well
be serious. 68 If uselessness is cultivated in these works,
then these works thereby also say something about the
exaggerated concern for usefulness in contemporar y
society. Should an ar tist adopt, as a central theme, the
destruction of value, then that ar tist wishes thereby
to say something about the contemporar y obsession
with growth and the accumulation of value. And
when business culture is ridiculed in playful imaginar y
economics, that play does not submit to the boastful
symbolic machiner y which seems to be the sine qua non
of modern enterprise. The fact that these ar tists
question the prominence of the economy in our daily lives
also in the critical and affirmative variants of imaginar y
economics is, in shor t, a serious deed in itself.

123

As a matter of fact,
the market for economic knowledge is
not a free market
at the moment, but a
monopoly where a

single line of thought

prevails. Those who
fail to believe in that
monopoly can turn to
imaginar y economics
for an alternative.

58 Joseph Beuys, Ar t = Capital, 1980. Joseph Beuys, c/o

Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2004 [OVB, WORDT NOG BEVESTIGD!]

Conclusion

In view of the scant income earned by most ar tists

according to statistics, less than five percent of Dutch
ar tists manage to make a living from their work it
would seem obvious to regard the economy mainly as a
negative force for them: an ar tist is either a victim of the
economy or is obliged, at best, to cater to it. Fur thermore, the dominant picture is of an economy that
sponges away on ar t: the business community uses ar t
to polish reputations by means of sponsoring or the
building of a corporate collection. The symbolic
production that fuels the present-day economy thrives on
images borrowed from ar t, while the innovations carried
out by ar tists remain unprotected by copyright. In this
economy ar tists are needed, at most, for the design of a
sexy website or to give a business the desired cultural
prestige.
In this essay I have shown that there can be a
dif ferent relationship between ar t and the economy,
where ar t is not a victim, but rather a source of
knowledge on the economy. Since the 1960s a steadily

growing group of ar tists has been implementing

imaginar y economics in their work. Their reflection and
comments on economic processes deviates not only in
terms of form, but also in terms of content, from the
economic knowledge that we encounter in day-to-day life,
through the academic world and the media.
The economic knowledge generated by ar tists is not

58

128

unambiguous, though. Illustrative of imaginar y economics

and its frequently enigmatic character is the text once
written by Joseph Beuys one of his famous blackboards
and on a German ten-mark note: KAPITAL=Kunst.
Beuyss statement can be interpreted in dif ferent ways:
as an indictment, for instance, of the ar t world which, on
initial consideration, seems only to follow its own logic
but in reality possesses a thoroughly capitalistic basis.
That indictment, voiced harshly during the sixties and
seventies, can now be heard again. In 1997 the Russian
ar tist Aleksandr Brener repeated Beuyss statement in
an almost literal way. On Januar y 4th of that year Brener
visited Amsterdams Stedelijk Museum, went to Kazimir
Malevichs white painting Suprematism (1922-1927)
and, with a can of spray paint, put a green dollar sign on
it. Immediately after wards, Brener turned himself in
to a guard of the museum. Later, from prison, he let it be
known that this was not a crime, but an avant-garde
ar twork. We were supposed to recognize the immorality
of the cultural elite that dominates the ar t world and
the destructiveness of the money trade that surrounds
ar t. Brener would like to launch a revolution that puts
an end to the economic, political and cultural corruption
of these times. The green dollar sign was a foreboding of
that.
The spraying of the dollar sign on a work of ar t may
be a condemnable act (as it constitutes vandalism) yet it
is also a form of imaginar y economics, of reflection
on the influence of the capitalist economy on cultural life.
Many contemporar y ar tists who, like Brener, are critical
toward the economy opt, however, for a dif ferent
strategy. On the basis of the conviction that it is, on the
one hand, impossible to operate outside the dominant
system and, on the other, that their economic approach
will be ignored as long as they behave as outsiders,
they position themselves within the market. That may
cause their work to have little consistency, but it does

129

provide it with a cer tain cogency. Prime examples are

Christoph Bchel, who auctioned of f his right to
par ticipate in Manifesta in order to comment on the
gatekeepers position held by curators in the world of
contemporar y ar t, and John Freyer, the ar tist who
sold all of his belongings via the internet auction site
eBay, thereby expressing his dissatisfaction with the
new impulse that e-commerce provides to consumerism.
Other ar tists interpret KAPITAL=Kunst not
sarcastically but literally. When Jef f Koons ingeniously
places consumer goods, such as vacuum cleaners,
in a display case, he confronts us with the fact that, in
our society, ar t has ultimately become a consumer item
which is fundamentally no dif ferent than a vacuum
cleaner. The most significant dif ference may lie with the
notion that ar t can be exchanged for capital due to the
buying power that is required to own ar t and due to the
investment potential that it of fers. In other words, Koons
is saying to his fellow ar tists that they should simply
forget their urge to escape the markets of capitalism
and acknowledge the fact that their own economy
is congruent with that of the capitalistic system in which
the ar t world is embedded.
In contemporar y imaginar y economics this affirmative
interpretation of the relationship between ar t and
the economy has not disappeared; it has undergone a
transformation, however, with respect to the yuppie
decade of the eighties which comprised Koonss natural
habitat. Ar tists such as Swetlana Heger, Plamen Dejanov
and Orgacom argue that the ar t world does not bear a
resemblance to the economy, rather the economy to the
ar t world: the present-day, postmodern logic of the
economy is a qualitative logic. This postmodern economy
displays an openness to the creativeness in ar t and to
its capacity for innovation. Because of that, ar tists
would be able to find new areas of work in businesses. In
shor t, this affirmative type of imaginar y economics
reasons that in the future it might become increasingly
difficult even to speak about ar t and the economy as two
separate realms.
There is a danger, however, that reflection on the
economy will remain trapped in such binar y categories:
criticism/affirmation, production/creation, price/value,

130

self-interest/altruism, market/gift. These categories

may have determined our way of thinking about economy
and culture since the nineteenth centur y, but by now
they have lost their acuteness and distinctness.
Imaginar y economics is, however, not confined to either
criticism or affirmation. A third interpretation of
KAPITAL=Kunst provided by imaginar y economics is that
of play. Ar tists who opt for this interpretation do not
allow themselves to be tempted into making
unambiguous and, by definition, naive statements about
the economy. For ultimately the thesis KAPITAL=Kuns is
charged with ambiguity. The playful variant of imaginar y
economics suggests that the present-day economic
system, with its exaggerated concern for scarcity and for
successive fashions and fads one being more shor tlived than the next and vulgar techniques for the luring
of consumers, is actually no more and no less rational
than primitive economies from classic anthropological
literature. Why should we take these economies so
seriously as we are accustomed to doing in present-day
society? Instead of focusing on overrated values such as
utility and efficiency, let the imagination be in charge!
Whichever interpretation of Beuyss KAPITAL=Kunst
and whichever form of imaginar y economics is ultimately
preferred by the audience, cer tainly all three contribute
to the disappearance of that categorical division
between ar t and the economy which is so typical of the
modern age. A huge amount is gained by this, and not
only for ar t. For the diversity of images and ideas
generated by the dif ferent forms of imaginar y economics
stands in sharp contrast to the simple-minded neoliberal
ideology which presently dominates economic thinking
within and beyond the academic community. As a matter
of fact, the market for economic knowledge is not
a free market at the moment, but a monopoly where a
single line of thought prevails. Those who fail to believe
in that monopoly can turn to imaginar y economics for
an alternative.

131

Notes

133

1
Mirapaul 2001. A list of objects is
available on the ar tists website,
www.allmylifeforsale.com; see also
Cohen 2002, pp. 286-289.
2
Lieshout 1998; Ruiter 2002. Over
the past years museums have been
giving ample consideration to this
economically inspired ar t with exhibitions such as Wor thless (Ljubljana
2000), Plan B (Amsterdam 2000),
Das fnfte Element Geld oder
Kunst (Dusseldor f 2000), Wer tWechsel. Zum Wer t des Kunstwerks
(Cologne 2001), Ar t & Economy
(Hamburg 2002) and Shopping. A
centur y of ar t and consumer
culture (Frankfur t 2002). The most
recent documenta (11) and Manifesta (4) allowed for a good deal of
work on economic processes. Ar t
magazines such s the German
Kunstforum, the Canadian Parachute and the Dutch Metropolis M
have been dedicating entire issues
to the theme of the economy.
3
Baxandall 1972; Montias 1990.
4
Brettell 1999, p. 60.
5
See also Amariglio 2001.
6
Greenberg 1939.
7
Peterson/Kem 1996; Huyssen
1986.
8
Officially the bank notes were not a
project of Seymour Likely itself but
of the yet unknown Seymour Likely
TM (trademark). Seymour Likely TM
announced its intention to auction
twenty of the notes at the Amsterdam galler y City Thoughts. The
ar tists trio Seymour Likely raised
an objection to this. In business
terms this could be regarded as a
hostile takeover. In a letter the trio
stated: We see that money is going
to replace ar t. No longer is something expensive because it is
valuable, but something is valuable
because it is expensive. Through
legal means, the three ar tists of

Seymour Likely foiled the auction

by having their lawyer call of f the
auction, which had been given the
name Money = Ar t. Seymour Likely
TM responded: The confusion that
has come about is basically not
unwelcome for that matter.
Confusion is a form of our ar tcritical objective. And as far as we
can tell, there is no copyright on
confusion. See Schreuder 1990;
Bruisma 1990.
9
For excellent sur veys on money ar t,
see Zurich 2002; Kunstforum
2000a; Weschler 1999. For an academic discussion of ar t and money,
Shell 1995; for money and the
American trompe-loeil tradition,
Frankenstein 1975. For a sur vey of
mail ar t and other ar tists bank
notes, Lbach-Hinweiser 2000.
10
Dodson 1999.
11
About Byrness euro design contest, see http://www.darklightfilmfestival.com/site/stray/pages/
ar tists/byrne.htm. About Knochengeld, see Kunstforum 2000b. In the
Netherlands, two similar exhibitions were held during the eighties:
Wat doen 30 kunstenaars met een
tientje? (Zwolle 1980) and One-dollar drawing project (Utrecht 1986).
12
About Klein, see Duve 1989; about
Palazzo, see Kunstforum 2000c.
About Jimmy Cauty en Bill
Drummond, see Drummond 2000:
in this inter view with The Guardian,
Drummond professed, six years
after the fact, to have no regrets
about the burning. In 1993 their K
Ar t Foundation had already received
a prize for the worst ar t of the year.
The prize was an alternative to
Great Britains prestigious Turner
Prize; Rachel Whiteread won both
of these. The K Ar t Foundation prize
comprised 40,000 pounds, twice
the amount of the Turner Prize.
13
Cabanne 1967, p. 63.
14
Quoted from Duchamp 1959

134

(1973), p. 187; see also Tomkins

1996, p. 261. After Monte Carlo
Bonds, more than ten years would
pass before Duchamp produced
another work of ar t. During this time
he devoted himself to playing chess.
15
Jensen 1994; quoted from
Naumann 1984, p. 192 and
Tomkins 1996, p. 285.
16
See Veblen 1899; about the
significance of prizes on the ar t
market, Velthuis 2005(?);
Duchamps statement is quoted
from Judovitz, p. 182.
17
Brger 1974 (1996), p. 51-52.
18
The Situationists were nonetheless
strongly opposed to the communism in Eastern Europe at that
time. In their view, it was nothing
more than an excessively bureaucratic form of capitalism.
19
Adorno and Horkheimer 1944
(1972), p. 158.
20
Quoted in Kwon 2003, p. 84.
21
Burn 1975 (1996), p. 908.
22
See Wallis 1984; Lippard 1997;
Bradley 2002.
23
Kunstforum 2000d; Benjamin
1935-40; Haacke 1986; Bourdieu/
Haacke 1995; Basualdo 2000, pp.
44-45.
24
Akst 2001; Bang Larsen 1999.
25
Hyde 1983, p. xiii.
26
About kunst rabat, see Mydans
1993. About Heideveld, see Laning
1993; Zwolle 2000. About net.ar t,
Ber wick 2002; Mirapaul 2002. See
Hyde 1983, p.xiii.
27
In New York there is in fact such as
store, The Apar tment, where a
single swipe of the credit card
enables clients to order a complete
interior including identity-establishing elements such as china, upholster y, wall decoration, books
and cds.

28
Cumming 2002; King 2002.
29
Ritzer 1999.
30
Mandiberg, the ar tist of the do-ityourself Walker Evans copy, carried
out the reverse experiment. For a
cer tain fee he would allow anyone,
anywhere in the world, to determine how his time would be spent.
On his website one could select an
activity and then the number of
hours that Mandiberg would have
to spend on this activity: Exploit
my labor for whatever means you
wish. Make me make ar t, or make
me run your errands, or make me
mediate for you. Trade your capital
for my labor, and exer t you power
and control.
31
See Bradley 2002.
32
Haden-Guest 1996, p. 40; see also
Crow 1996.
33
Brger 1874 (1996), pp. 57-58.
34
Bourdieu 1993, p. 75; see also
Abbing 2002.
35
See Mirapaul 2001.
36
Judovitz 1995, p. 162; Jones
1994.
37
Camfield 1989, pp. 91-92.
38
Cage himself was hardly free of the
capitalist desire for proper ty which
Schwarzs edition exploited.
Ironically enough, he prompted
Duchamp to produce a second version of Czech Check; Cage evidently wanted a signature of Duchamp
for himself. When Cage received
his membership card for the new
year from the Czech mycological
society, on the same day that the
old card was sold during the fundraising campaign, Duchamp signed
the new card for him as well.
Quoted from, respectively, Tomkins
1996, pp. 426-427; Naumann
1999, p. 22; Duve 1990, p. 308;
Judovitz 1995, p. 161; see also
Jones 1994, pp. 140, 96. For that
matter, the same market scarcely

135

has a problem with the later reproductions of the readymades, and

dealers distinguish them from the
originals without difficulty. As a
critic remarked at the end of the
nineties: While Duchamp often
blurred such distinctions, they
become impor tant in defining his
market. A good signature and the
ar tists touch still mean something
in terms of prices. See Ar t and
Auction Magazine, October 1999.
39
See, for example, Huyssen 1986.
40
Camfield 1989, p. 96.
41
Warhol 1975.
42
According to Kostabi, quantity is
just as impor tant in ar t as quality.
In his studio, which he called
Kostabi World, predominantly
Russian ar tists worked in shifts on
paintings based on Kostabis own
ideas.
43
Bar telink 1993.
44
Armstrong/Marshall 1989, p. 10;
see also Foster 1996, p. 99.
45
Inter view with Sandro Chia, see
Chia 1988.
46
Mar tijn van Nieuwenhuyzen and
Jan van Adrichem, Sampling, exhib.
Kyoto Shoin International.
47
Brger 2002.
48
Rifkin 2000, pp. 163, 5; Castells
1996; Bell 1976; Pine/Gilmore
1999.
49
Veelen 1991; Sto 1993.
50
About Alan Kaprow, see Ltticken
2002.
51
Roos 1992a and 1992b; Poos
1991.
52
Johnson 1997.
53
Siebelink 2000; Seijdel 1999. For
similar projects of the German
ar tists initiative
Reingungsgesellschaft, see:

www.reingungsgesellschaft.de,
www. arbeitsgeist.de and
www.forum-unternehmenskultur.de
54
Jansen/Siebelink 2000.
55
Lvi-Strauss 1962.
56
Keynes 1936; Schumpeter 1942
(1976), pp. 82-85.
57
As par t of the project Loneliness in
the City, the originally Spanish
ar tist Alicia Framis kept night watch
as a dreamkeeper in the homes
of random people. The Rotterdam
ar tist Jeanne van Heeswijk actively
involves the local community in her
ar t projects. Otto Berchem organized a dating scene at a supermarket in Amterdams Jordaan district by placing yellow baskets at
the entrance. Those who made use
of a basket in this color thereby
indicated openness to a new relationship. See, for instance, Pontzen
2000.
58
Metropolis 2000.
59
See http://www.irational.org/
tm/ar t of work/management.html.
Though on a much more critical
basis, the British ar tists John
Latham and Barbara Steveni
attempted long before to place
ar tists in companies and in social
organizations via their Ar tist
Placement Group. The two ar tists
established this initiative in 1966
and later named it Organisation
and Imagination, or O + I.
60
Dodson 1999. Young produced one
video which shows how she is
coached in her ar tistr y by a communications advisor and another
where she gives a workshop in
business communication at
Speakers Corner in Londons Hyde
Park. In another video one sees the
owner of a galler y, where Young is
exhibiting, in discussion with a
venture capitalist or financier
about the ar t market. See also
Weale 1999; Kelsey 2002.
61
Lapp 2002; Brger 2002;
Camnitzer 2002.

136

62
Naumann 1999, p. 245.
63
Naumann 1999, p. 25.
64
Klein bequeathed two good friends,
Arman and Claude Pascal, the right
to use this color and to sign paintings with his name following his
death. See Duve 1989; Stich 1994.
65
Sans 2002. During the sixties
Fluxus ar tists had also tried to
upset the (ar t) economy by putting
inexpensive ar t objects into circulation on a large scale. Willem de
Ridder ran, for instance, the
fluxshop European Mail Order
Warehouse, a kind of mail-order
business for ar t, from which De
Ridder distributed prints for Fluxus
Europe Nor th.
66
Explanation of the ar tist with
exhibition Parolin Products
Home, Herringer Kiss Galler y,
Calgar y (Canada), April 2004.
67
See Leiby 1999; Mirapaul 1999.
68
Huizinga 1938 (1937), p. 19. See
also Sutton-Smith 1997.

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Sur vey of Exhibitions

(selection)
ART: Museum des Geldes
ber die seltsame Natur des
Geldes in Kunst, Van Abbe
Museum, Eindhoven 1979
Horn of Plenty
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
1988
Corporate Identity
Galerie Torch, Amsterdam 1991
Business Art
Groninger Museum, Groningen
1993

142

Sylvie Fleury 49000

Museum fr neue Kunst ZKM,
Karlsruhe 2001
Leve de valsmunterij
Grafisch Atelier, Utrecht 2002
Art & Economy
Deichtorhallen, Hamburg 2002
Capital Affair
Helmhaus, Zurich 2002
Shopping
100 Jahre Kunst und Konsum,
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfur t 2002

Travel Agency
Mehdi Choukri galerie, Berlin 1997
Super discount, Fri-Ar t, Fribourg
1998

Geld und Wert

Das letzte Tabu, Swiss Expo 02,
Biel 2002

Ideas for Living

Galerie Micheline Szwajcer,
Antwerp 1998

ReProduction
Galerie Bernhard Knaus,
Mannheim 2003

C.R.A.S.H.
ICA Galler y, London 1999
Dream City, Kunstverein, Munich
1999

Global Priority
Her ter Ar t Galler y, University of
Amherst, Amherst 2003

Worthless
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana 2000
Das fnfte Element
Geld oder Kunst,
Stdtische Kunsthalle, Dsseldor f
2000
Plan B
De Appel, Amsterdam 2000
Capital, Tate Galler y (on line),
London 2001
Carey Young
Business as Usual,
John Hansard Galler y,
Southampton 2001
Orgacom
Stedelijk Museum Bureau
Amsterdam, Amsterdam 2001
Wertwechsel
Zum Wer t des Kunstwerks,
Museum fr angewandte Kunst,
Cologne 2001

Work Ethic
Baltimore Museum of Ar t,
Baltimore 2003
Mark Lombardi: Global Networks
The Drawing Center, New York City
2003

Credits

143

This publication was partly made possible through the financial support of
the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and
the Mondriaan Foundation. The
English translation was made possible by a grant of NWO. The research
carried out in connection with this
publication was funded with an intermediary grant of the Fonds BKVB.

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