It's all about the money

(© Gianni Motti)

Art and money. It has always been a tricky combination. The Italian artist Gianni Motti drew attention to the taboos about the subject in his “Funds Show” exhibition by hanging the budget allocated for his exhibition on the wall in the form of single-dollar bills. You can see a photograph of his stunt in “The Forfeiture of Money”, a group exhibition about both the physical and intangible manifestations of money. The exhibition also includes another work by Motti, who had a sheet of bronze painted as a dollar bill by Swiss watchmakers: a carefully executed piece of precision work that works as a trompe l’oeil illusion. But counterfeiters will be disappointed: the value and the production costs of this work of art far exceed the value of a fake dollar bill. Ivan Argote also inverts capitalist logic. He wanted – as a kind of parody of begging – to offer people money in the Paris metro. But that didn’t work – the commuters, as apathetic as always, ignored their would-be benefactor. Argote’s successful action recalled a similar performance that William Pope.L had staged on a previous occasion. Zachary Formwalt and Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor work with more abstract economic models. Formwalt photographed a series of books about all sorts of economic theories in an antiques shop, thereby offering a condensed survey of financial history. There is a clever video by Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor in which we see someone reading Marx’s Capital, with the camera focusing only on the book and the reader’s hands. The (slow) course of the video corresponds to the act of reading. The work refers to a remark by Jacques Le Goff: “Capital, at the end of the day, it’s like the telephone directory: you turn three pages, and that’s enough.” In an intelligent, and occasionally flippant, way, “The Forfeiture of Money” succeeds in offering food for thought on its topic

The Forfeiture of Money > 7/4, do/je/Th > za/sa/Sa 12 > 18.30, gratis/gratuit/free,
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