The End of Money

THE END OF MONEY Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art THE END OF MONEY Edited by Juan A. Gaitán C o n t e n t Introduction 4 Juan A. Gaitan Mark to Market Value, Inc. 10 (1st of 9 text works spread through this publication) Tonel The Theory of Money 12 Pierre Bismuth “Where is the Money, Lebowski?” 14 Making Ends Meet Dieter Roelstraete Notes on Improperties 24 Hadley+Maxwell Five Acts of Money 32 Carolina Sanín Zachary Formwalt 42 The End of Coins, the Triumph of Money, 44 and the Disruptive Revolution of Art Donatien Grau Lili Reynaud-Dewar 50 The End Always Comes Twice 58 Dessislava Dimova Appendix 71 Biographies 137 Colophon and Acknowledgements 143 Introduction Since the severe funding cuts that will soon hit the Dutch culture sector were announced in 2010, discourse on arts Juan A. Gaitán and culture has become almost exclusively centered on the issue of money. Displeasure and outrage have quickly emerged from private into public discussions about the governmental resolution to reduce its spending – a resolution made by resolute bureaucrats whose reasoning they have kept mostly to themselves, in spite of the (suspiciously) spectacular tactics used to publicize their radical decisions. According to the rumors and the numbers, the cuts will affect institutions across the board. National museums will lose 20% of their operating budgets, presentation houses (of which an as of yet undisclosed six will remain) an equal or higher amount. Music, theatre, and dance are in no better shape. Neither are individual artists, who now face a 50% reduction in available funds. But it also seems that this is not a new problem. Once one has factored in the exceptional growth in and of institutions dedicated to arts and culture, in the Netherlands cultural funding is now 20% of what it was twenty years ago. It being so obvious that an efficient reductions system has long been silently in motion, why the decision to “open,” even to “offer,” this issue up for public debate? (The counter to this question is, of course: What is it that is not being debated publicly when we speak about money for the arts? Surely there are other areas of much more general interest for the public sphere that are being affected by this neo-liberal move away from government subsidy). Unlike former cuts, which in spite of laying the ground for the current ones were motivated by less dogmatic concerns, the current cuts constitute an inimical demand for cultural institutions to become financially self-sufficient. In the more immediate future this means that cultural institutions will have to internalize the dominant logic of the economy and find ways to justify their existence in the terms set by this logic (numbers); in a more general sense, however, this may not be an isolated assault, directed exclusively at arts and culture. It is very likely that this neo-liberal economic attitude extends to other, more essen- tial areas of daily life: health, education, housing. Thus we should at least acknowledge the possibility that this assault on culture is part of a much wider project – the systematic dismantling of the welfare state and of all the vestiges of a socialist system, and the re-direction of tax money towards other areas of government. (But which? If one follows the American model, one would have to conclude that the move is towards: banking and military operations, followed by infrastructural subsidies, followed by sporadic and merely palliative subsidies for health, education, housing, though only at the level of investment interests and not at the level 4 5 Introduction of individuals; parallel to this is the re-direction of large alienation, there was never any doubt that individual quantities of money destined to produce long-term revenue workers actually had thoughts while engaged in repetitious such as lines of credit for foreign countries.) tasks the more common meaning given to the concept of alienation (alienation from the product of one’s labor) The End of Money is a critical statement within this crisis gained the sense of an even more important alienation – of public investment, in the arts and elsewhere, but it is not of action from thought. The aim was to affect not thought about the financial component of this much more general alone, but creativity, which can only take place when there crisis. In its necessarily narrow focus on art and money, the is continuity and a convergence of thought and action. exhibition aimed at these two problems (money and art) Such utopias have of course been fraught with not as mutually sustaining subjects, but as two different aporias and paradoxes. The most important ones take us functions of abstraction and dematerialization. It is not the back to Hegel’s conception of the end of art: As Dieter relationship between art and money that this exhibition set Roelstraete argues in his essay, for Hegel the end of art is out to address, but the nostalgia for a tangible world that marked by the incorporation of the work of art into history – might be experienced outside the value systems set by eco- which means that it is consequently released from the nomic interests or the preconceptions imposed by excessive space of transcendental correspondences. In this sense, art representations of the world. Such is the utopian horizon and money are subjected to inverse transformations. Money towards which the idea of the end of money is pointing. loses the ties to necessity that more immediate forms of The exhibition thus presents one of the issues at exchange still carry and becomes the standard itself; art, hand – money – as categorically different from the other on the other hand, loses ground in the space of mimetic issue at hand – art – treating them as a-parallel problems. representations (and transcendental correspondences) as If the function of money today is to insist and to further an the material world is systematically incorporated into the abstract ordering of the world suitable to economic determinations of monetary value and economic interests. interests, then the function of art is exactly the opposite: Gold is the conductor of both operations, as it is the last When one speaks of “the end of art,” one is in fact speaking link to nature in the development of monetary economies, of the very horizon towards which artistic production in the principal (though not the most expensive) symbol of the modern age has been directed. That horizon is perhaps symbolic value, and the last (or latest) of the elements to best articulated within Lucy Lippard’s notion of the be folded into the world of speculative economics. “dematerialization of art,” or the realization of an avant- At the heart of Donatien Grau’s essay is the provo- gardist ethos according to which art is to effect its own end cative claim that the end of coins (and, by extension, of fiat by dissolution – into everyday life, into other forms of currency) is the triumph of money. This argument focuses production, and so on. Of course, before this happens, on another historical problem that is not so commonly dis- everyday life has to adopt the conditions necessary for such cussed: the coin, as one of the original forms of fiat currency, dissolution, and one of these conditions, as Dessislava has never been just the carrier of monetary value, it is also Dimova argues in this book (and presents as a missed his- the carrier of symbolic value; a value that is constantly torical opportunity), is the emancipation of leisure from threatening to supersede the denomination of the coin and the double administration of labor and time. Although this make its monetary value irrelevant. In this sense, as Grau’s fact is rarely discussed, it is no accident that so many of introduction suggests, in the coin one already has the two the products of early-20th century avant-garde art and sides of the Hegelian art historical narrative: the threat that design were objects of leisure (chess boards, tea pots, tables the real places to the symbolic and the threat that the sym- and chairs, and so on) meant to interpellate the relation- bolic places to the real. ship that the industrial revolution established between the In these equations of money the individual remains human body and labor. one of the most commonly overseen factors. Using the Like that of several other optimists, Lippard’s elements of what, resorting to a Graeco-Latinism, Serge utopia was underpinned by an enthusiasm for the machine Doubrovsky called autofiction (distinguishable from a and its promise to emancipate humans from labor – or, if fictionalized autobiography, in that the primary purpose not from labor tout court, then at least from the more labori- of autofiction is not biographical) Carolina Sanín brings the ous aspects of labor. To put it in the terms set by Hannah individual face to face with a repertoire of desires that are Arendt: the hope has been to establish a continuity between produced within the logic of money, at least as understood thought and action that industrial labor precluded. At least by capitalism. Put otherwise, Sanín’s Five Acts of Money is in the more sophisticated theories of modern labor and a story about the ethos of the capitalist logos. 6 Juan A. Gaitán 7 Introduction This book has been conceived as a parallel reflection to the exhibition The End of Money. It includes a number of con- tributions that extend the exhibition proper beyond its self-contained existence in the gallery space. In this respect, it is also a vehicle through which the exhibition can find different discursive grounds for exploring the theme of the end of money, both as a literary and as an iconographic motif.

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