The value of virtual transactions rose from $819 billion in 2001 to a quadrillion dollars today. This exponential growth can be compared to the success of bitcoin. A good example of the potential of social cooperation which generates money from the Commons and integrate the power of finance in its ability to mobilize, distribute and multiply wealth to upgrade the quality of life and the power of social intelligence.

Since money lost its referent in gold, the store of value, and found its new moorings in silicon, the second most common element on earth, it has multiplied exponentially. This shift from gold to silicon, of course, does not involve two equivalent substances. Gold used to be stored in fortressed vaults to guarantee the value of currency. Silicon is worked to make the substrate which enables the construction of increasingly faster, ubiquitous and connected logical machines. While gold strove to make the value of money stable (with disastrous consequences when it became too much and hence less valuable), silicon allows for its indefinite multiplication.

The exponential growth of monetisation

In her overview of the operation of contemporary finance delivered at the Money Lab Conference in Amsterdam in 2014, Saskia Sassen described finance as a ‘capability‘ and the ‘steam engine of our epoch, its power’. As she recounted, the value of silicon-based, virtual transactions between 2001 and 2014 has gone from 819 billions in 2001 to 62.2 trillion in 2008 and now to a quadrillion dollars. An accelerated and multidirectional transactivity enabled by digital technologies thus accounts for the exponential growth of monetisation.

A material asset like a ‘little house’ is turned into an asset-backed security and incorporated into financial instruments whose complexities can only be managed through the math of physicists. As a capability, finance creates a virtual mode of money, that does not simply reflect the value of the underlining asset, but the calculations, opinions and judgments of institutions and networks of humans and machines. As in the sovereign debt crises, the risks of these operations fall back on the owners of the material asset (homeowners, ordinary citizens), as the number of foreclosures and expulsions, but also cuts and privatisation of public and social services have also steeply risen.

The accumulation of value and power that finance has generated is thus at the moment a power waged against society–like an army which uses debt as a bridge to conquer a territory. The short brutal history of the exponential rise of silicon-based money in the first decades of the 21^st century, she concluded, sees the predatory powers of finance employed in a new bout of very material land grabbing (both urban and rural, both the city centres of the global cities and land in Africa) which is going to change the DNA of society as such.

Bare activity

For post-workerist Marxists and other contemporary critics of the economy, the emergence of finance also indicates capitalism’s answer to the entrance of a new heterogeneous composition of living labor into production. Capitalism does not accumulate surplus value simply by underpaying labor, but it draws value from the whole of society–from ordinary social activities such as talking, commenting, liking, listening, reading, expressing an opinion, cooking, making music or art, wearing fashion, taking photos, recording videos, walking, partying etc.

Rather than reducing virtual money to a simulation which refers only to the imitative processes of the stock market, post-workerist authors believe that it expresses the mode of capture of a new quality of something that we might not even define as work any more, but as a kind of bare activity: whether it is described as the communicative and linguistic powers of labor (Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi) or the pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic powers of the virtual subjective force of memory (Maurizio Lazzarato, Brian Massumi), this is a power that does not exhaust itself in its material products, but which first of all produces new modes of existence and figures of the self.

The value of the little house transformed into an asset-backed security is thus to be indexed not primarily to the material substance of the house, but to the emotional, intellectual and affective labor that architects, builders and owners put into it; to the beauty of its surrounding urban architecture including its parks, hospitals, museums, schools and university; to the density and liveliness of its social life, its cafès, restaurants and markets; and to the aesthetic qualities of its cultural forms, that is its music, its food, its art, its fashion. The activity which created the value of the little house works with the ecological limits of the finite or scarce nature of material resources, but it is powered by the expansive drive of the desire for social life. It meets the scarcity and limits of nature with new ways of doing things, new ways of enjoying and caring for the world and for others, and new ways of voluntarily acting in common.

As Maurizio Lazzarato put it, social cooperation is not about the distribution of scarce resources but about the continuous re-invention and re-enchantment of the world. It does not proceed through the harmonization of an invisible hand, but through the interplay of sympathies and antipathies, likes and dislikes, mutual or asymmetrical captures modulating the incessant circulation of the pre-individual currents of affects, beliefs and desires that underlie social life.

The fall of the marginal cost of everything

Unlike what Jeremy Rifkin thinks, capital, on the other hand, is not a complex system bound to rationally accept its own demise by virtue of the fall of the marginal cost of everything. As a social relation based in domination, its answer to the falling rate of profit is to reinject scarcity and control there where there is potential abundance and freedom. It destroys by means of war, bubbles and cuts to essential services, the wealth that it has generated so that it can start again its cycle of accumulation somewhere else. Most of us must work and accept the price that the market thinks our capacities, our skills and our competences (our human capital) are individually worth: as communicative, social and cooperative capacities are as common as silicon, then they are considered to be worth very little overall.

The little money that is commonly used to pay work with is money already captured in advance, it is already allocated: it goes to pay rent, mortgage, bills, food, credit cards, loans, taxes, interests, insurances and whatever the global market thinks you should be able to consume. Wage money is the measure of your powerlessness to connect to the ‘engine of power’ that is to shape the future of society as such–to change its DNA as Sassen put it.

Hegemony of silicon money

The virtual currency movement has had the merit to show that in current conditions of the hegemony of silicon money, money is something that can be designed. The design of a currency which does not behave like an invading army in relation to social life probably passes through currencies such as bitcoin, but it cannot stop there. There are valuable components of the bitcoin protocol that a money of the commons (Andrea Fumagalli) could usefully adopt (such as the blockchain ledger), but the mechanisms of money creation enacted by the bitcoin protocols seem inadequate to the task.

The invention and success of bitcoins are examples of the powers of social cooperation, but its design does not promote it. A bitcoin is still generated through work, that is the work of mining bitcoins, even as this work is mostly performed by the computational power of logic and silicon-based machines. A bitcoin’s value is still determined by utility, that is its capacity to be spent in order to purchase something and hence satisfy an individual need. The two mechanisms of money-creation produce an eminently hoardable and unstable currency as the work of mining bitcoins gets harder (thus producing scarcity) while at the same time its utility-value is dependent on market pricing and the utility it finds in bitcoin as a store of value or medium of exchange.

A money of the commons should be directly generated by social cooperation, partaking of the powers of finance as a capability to mobilize, distribute and multiply wealth in order to nurture the social common–that is the quality of social life and the powers of social intelligence. It would have its own logic of financing and investment mobilized this time to create new institutions of commonfare (Carlo Vercellone)–networks of institutions composing new democratic, participatory welfare systems concerned with education, research, health, housing and the provision of a basic income. A money of the common should thus be both a goal and a presupposition for an economy where something as common and ordinary as social existence is the source of everything that makes life worth living.

Tiziana Terranova
published in MCD #76, « Changer l’argent », déc. 2014 / févr. 2015

Tiziana Terranova teaches and researches digital and network cultures in Naples, Italy. She’s the author of Network Culture (Pluto Press, 2004) and a member of the free university network Euronomade.

Much soul, very emotion

Brett Scott, the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, explains why he uses Dogecoin, despite some people in the crypto-currency community have written it is a joke, or even a scam. The former broker insists: Dogecoin is the best of all the so-called ‘alt-coins’.

I use Dogecoin because I’m emotionally drawn to the dog. Unlike the distant, fossil-like Queen on the pound banknote, the Shibu Inu is at once transcendent and approachable, self-contained but cuddly, looking into my eyes with a sideways glance, as if it just noticed me and is wondering whether I want to play or be left alone. It’s not an aggressive dog, or for that matter, a bouncy dog trying to lick me. It has self-directed, quirky soul, and it’s almost impossible to imagine this dog being an asshole.

Some people in the crypto-currency community have written Dogecoin off as a joke, or even a scam. Maybe it’s both, but does this matter? All currency in the final analysis is really a scam, and the real question is which of those scams we want to agree to. I for one would rather pledge allegiance to a mystical pooch than to worship the image of a redundant monarch.

Indeed, Dogecoin, to me, is the best of all of the so-called ‘alt-coins’, the alternative crypto-currencies that have emerged as offshoots from the original Bitcoin source-code. Here is why.

Money isn’t ‘rational’

Run this question through your brain: Why did people invent pottery? The response from many people is because it must have been useful to store food and water, an answer which chimes well with our prevailing rationalistic world view. The assumption that pottery was explicitly ‘invented’ is problematic though, and furthermore, evidence suggests that pottery was originally used to create abstract religious figurines.

There is a similar problem among many economists who attempt to peddle ahistorical narratives about ‘why people invented money’. Their story normally involves people ‘rationally’ designing money as an alternative to ‘barter’. There is very little immediately rational about exchanging real goods for pieces of paper or shiny bits of metal though. Sure, once the social convention of monetary exchange is set up, it’s useful, but the imagined process in which bakers and butchers ‘invent’ money to deal with the awkwardness of exchanging meat for sourdough loaves is an attempt to reverse-engineer history from the perspective of present dogma.

Money is not an object that can be invented. It is a social convention that has to be culturally constructed. The use of monetary tokens only appears rational once we’re party to a collective agreement (or delusion) to imbue those tokens with value, and that collective agreement needs to be constantly maintained.

State power, local trust, meta-national mysticism and labour

In the case of our normal fiat currency, the collective agreement is given strength by the psychological (and real) force of official authorities. Most of our fiat currency is created by commercial banks, but derives much of its ‘reality’ from state endorsement of its legal status.

In the absence of a state championing a currency, you need other factors to induce collective acceptance. For example, a very small community might be able to create and maintain a local currency backed by nothing but the preexisting communal trust network, woven together from mutual friendships, ties of honour and anxiety at facing exclusion from the social group.

To create belief in a non-national currency that is not located in a small community though, is especially hard. Bitcoin provides a fascinating case study of the process. When it first started, bitcoin commanded almost no value. It had one crucial feature though. At its heart was a mysterious, almost immaterial figure called Satoshi Nakomoto, a focal point for a community to rally around.

The mystique of Satoshi was vital, imbuing what was otherwise a clever but cold piece of cryptography with a soul that people could believe in. Satoshi was the holy ghost in the machine, and the act of mining resembled a ritualistic quest to build on the blockchain started by the ghost. It’s through this process that the imagined value of bitcoin came to life, and started taking on a reality.

By contrast, imagine if a well-known person, like Stephen Hawking, invented bitcoin. It would be devoid of all mystery, resembling a science project or a corporate product, rather than an underground movement. The specifics of Stephen’s personality would replace the cryptic symbol that the Satoshi figure once stood for, and what would you have left? A clever piece of cryptography, and a somewhat banal act of using up energy in running computers.

That said, there is something about the pointless nature of randomly churning algorithms through a computer that is psychologically powerful. If you want to imagine that something essentially ephemeral is a useful commodity, it helps if you expend labour in creating it, because labour implies scarcity (you only need to work for things that are scarce), and scarcity implies a potential for an exchange value (if something is abundant there is no need to exchange anything for it).

The computing power (‘labour’) put into the bitcoin network does not create value in itself, but is a further psychological backer to bitcoin tokens’ imagined value. If they weren’t valuable we wouldn’t exert all this labour would we, and because we exert this labour they must be valuable, right?

The emergent myth of bitcoin’s rationality

Interestingly, as the ritualistic process of mining has become increasingly competitive, and the commercialisation of bitcoin has steamed ahead, new narratives have formed to explain why bitcoin tokens ‘rationally’ have value.

Chief among these is the idea, touted by the bitcoin foundation itself, that bitcoins have value ‘because they are useful’. It is part of a broader trend among the bitcoin elite to rewrite history and claim, in hindsight, that the value of bitcoin was always self-apparent, and that early adopters were just getting involved due to rational future expectations of increasing societal recognition of bitcoin’s use value as a secure means of exchange.

In this formulation, bitcoin tokens derive their value by being part of a potentially useful system, the value of each bitcoin reflecting the aggregate market assessment of how useful it is to have a secure means of exchange. It’s kind of like arguing that containers on train carriages derive the entirety of their value from the usefulness of the rail network. The implicit narrative is this: Hey, these things are useful as transmitters of value for exchange, so let’s compete over them, and in so doing create their market value, which can now be used for exchange.

Circular no? There may be a glimmer of truth in it, but it’s mostly an attempt to describe the essentially emotional and social process of currency creation with the language of cold individual rationality.

Tin-man currencies ain’t got no heart

This thinking has subsequently influenced the way that a lot of alternative crypto-coins have attempted to market themselves. Rather than embracing their own absurdity, many alt-coins have marketed their efficiency, their security, or their application to some specialist use case, as if the usefulness and competitiveness of the design was the most important aspect of why a person accepts a currency.

The crypto-conference has thus become the realm of ‘serious people’ discussing ‘serious business’, not wishy-washing mysticism and emotion. They appeal to rational functionality, rather than inspiring people to use them. They are techno-fetishistic. A guy with a PowerPoint presentation calmly explains the business case for why his crypto-currency is valuable because it uses a state-of-the-art turbo hashing system, but for fuck’s sake, tell me why I should BELIEVE in it!

It’s true that this strategy has worked to some extent for some alt-coins like lightcoin, quarkcoin and peercoin, which have gained some popularity based on design, but think about this question: Why do you use british pounds or yen? The answer to that is never, because they’re well designed, and neither is it because I rationally see how useful it is for me to have a medium of exchange, and neither is it because I’m intimidated by the state and they force me to use it.

Our answer is mostly just because everyone else seems to use it and I was taught to use it. We are born into currencies just like we are born into languages, and we learn to use them in a social context. If you want to convince a person to accept ephemeral electronic records as a currency, you need a story for people to hold on to. You need heart.

Dogecoin  is a cult, and that’s how it should be

Which brings us to Dogecoin. I can believe in Dogecoin because it gives me something to believe in. It’s a direct appeal to irrationality, a direct appeal to transcend the banal world of individual utility calculation and submit to something hilariously absurd. It is, above all, a cult, and that is infinitely more attractive than any cold appeal to robust design.

It is the peaceful, playful gaze of the Doge itself that is the mystical foundation of the currency. It doesn’t matter who invented it, because Dogecoin  is not experienced as a narcissistic project of a particular person, and it’s the symbol itself that is the leader. The Doge is a figure without ego, with cross-cultural, cross-gender, and yes, even cross-species appeal. We can all get something from the gaze of the Shibu.

This is reflected in the resultant community that has emerged around Dogecoin, people who refer to themselves as ‘shibes’ and give each other gifts of Doge. While the bitcoin subreddit has turned into a moshpit of aggressive trolling, Dogecoin  forums feel inclusive and accepting, cohering around a surreal world of esoteric slogans and acts of goodwill.

In closing then, a word on design. If there has ever been any clever design in Dogecoin, it’s been in the way the core members have focused on creating a culture from the bottom-up, rather than fetishising currency creation as a technical solution to be marketed from above. The Dogecoin  community has grown rapidly in response to community acts that establish a reason to believe in the currency, such as the sponsorship of underdogs like the Jamaican bobsleigh team, and oddball stunts like backing a Nascar racer. These are things you can sit in a pub and laugh about, outside conference halls, and that makes all the difference.

Brett Scott
published in MCD #76, “Changer l’argent”, déc. 2014 / févr. 2015

Brett Scott is a journalist, campaigner and the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013).

Keep it moving, there’s everything to see and nothing to sell

With her ironic pieces, French artist Albertine Meunier forces us to see things from a different angle, introducing a grain of sand into the well-oiled gears of our digital world, beginning with Google. Within the results of the ubiquitous search engine, she re-categorized Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades as belonging to the Net Art period (The Innards of L.H.O., 2013-2014)—a very dadaist update, which she explains below.

Since July 27, 2013, Albertine Meunier has been hacking Google with a “Ready Made Hack”, The Innards of L.H.O. Anyone who searches one of Marcel Duchamp’s artworks will find that it belongs to the “Net Art” period. Duchamp may be the father of contemporary art, but he never lived to see the Internet! Thanks to this semantic hack of Google’s Knowledge Graph, Duchamp’s best-known works—Fountain (the infamous urinal), Bicycle Wheel, Nude Descending a Staircase, Bottle Rack—are all time-stamped as Net Art… without a word of protest so far from the online giant.

How do you explain why Google hasn’t done anything to stop your Ready Made Hack on Duchamp for the past year now?
I appear very openly on the history list of changes, so they must know! It has also been in the media—I promoted The Innards of L.H.O. during FIAC, the contemporary art show in Paris in 2013, before summer I launched a crowdfunding campaign to publish a book documenting this performance, which has just been released and is visible all over the place. Maybe Google is leaving it as a Duchamp-style transformation? (laughs) A number of people said to me: “Why did you do it on Duchamp? Nobody’s interested in him. But if you did it on a politician, everyone would be talking about it.” That’s exactly my point, that Google is more interested in LOL culture than in art, or at least in this symbol of 20th century art that is Duchamp.

Does confronting Google with Duchamp-style art amount to demonstrating that the all-powerful giant isn’t all that?
Google claims to carry all of human knowledge, but it isn’t vigilant! It opened a cultural institute in France for its good conscience, but it doesn’t know the first thing about art! My little hack shows its patent ignorance, while highlighting its pretentious ambitions. But when you’re pretentious, you need to live up to the situation! I also wanted to show that things in the digital world are not necessarily as they seem, assumed and acceptable, impossible to criticize. You can consider the Knowledge Graph from a critical viewpoint and overthrow the search engine’s authority figure.

Especially if the authority figure “devalues” Duchamp’s importance. Is it also a criticism of the art market?
In 2009, I took an interest in the art market, with Mona LHO, an Internet-connected ready-made par excellence. I found a nice ashtray and cigarette holder with a picture of the Mona Lisa, I connected it to the AMCI (Art Market Confidence Index), which ranges from de –40 to +40. This value is displayed on the base of Mona LHO, to show that you can take any object and connect it (like Duchamp) to make a connected ready-made. It’s also a wink at this value that is supposed to indicate a healthy market, placed in the ashtray.

Is it a criticism of speculation in art?
I’ve always seen the index as a positive value, never negative. Isn’t it strange that this index never dips below zero?

Is the hidden message “Don’t get attached to mercantile contingencies”?
It’s good to buy artworks, but buying on the art market is useless! I buy stuff as a collector because I like art, but market speculation kills art—the rating has no meaning, it’s even counter-productive for people who want to collect, as it distances you from the art. Many pieces become inacessible, especially among contemporary artists. Personally, I don’t buy art to invest my money…

Is it a criticism of money?
Yes, of the speculative aspect of money! Because this object that I found at a flea market in Montrouge is a ready-made Mona Lisa, I didn’t do anything to the object itself. So is it art? To me it’s much more than a Russian doll, a bouncing object. It’s one of the objects that I don’t want to sell!

Why?
To me, it has no value, or rather, it’s priceless! For me, its value is so high that I will keep it until I die. As I don’t live off the sale of my artworks [Albertine is an R&D engineer in a big company], I don’t need to sell them. So I came up with another system, confiding them to people, like my life assets. I entrust them to people who will commit to taking care of them.

So you exclude yourself from the market?
In terms of speculation, yes. An artist’s true freedom is being independent of the market, not having to produce only things that will sell. The current gallery model is obsolete. It used to be that a gallery would take an artist under its wing and take care of his or her production, and the artist would enjoy a sort of universal income. Today it’s hard to maintain a certain amount of freedom, as the artworks need to be somewhere, not in boxes!

And the people to whom you choose to confide your artistic life assets are cherry-picked by you?
Yes, isn’t it a luxury? (laughs) The point is that it circulates. No matter if it sells or not!

Interview by Annick Rivoire
published in MCD #76, « Changer l’argent », déc. 2014 / févr. 2015

Albertine Meunier has been practicing so-called digital art since 1998 and uses the Internet as raw material. She defines herself as a Net artist, which is not necessarily her artistic net worth.

> http://www.albertinemeunier.net

The artist’s currency has no use for archaic monetary systems, financial deregulation or distorted construction value. It’s a new form of political subversion, as proven by initiatives in South America that are reinventing the rules for spreading culture.

Instead of complaining about oppression and lack of money, activists have been creating alternative currencies and financial circuits that propose a new approach to capital. Bitcoin stands out among these alternatives as a currency that is not issued by a Central Bank and exists only on the internet, where it can be accumulated as digital files. It may seem lighthearted, like Monopoly money, but bitcoin is currently listed at over €400 at today’s official exchange rate (1). Bitcoin is not the only existing modern currency alternative, nor is this area of activity merely the domain of hackers and financial market experts.

Without worrying about encryption or investment grants, artists are creating imaginary currencies, as well as their own banks and systems that propose alternatives to macroeconomic models. Through a wide range of critical initiatives, they seek to establish new rules for the circulation of culture, using their own money to mimic value creation processes and as a device for political subversion.

Alternative currency as a collaborative methodology

One of the first collaborative currency experiments was conducted in Brazil, back in 2005. This was the now famous and controversial Cubo Card, issued by Circuito Fora do Eixo. It was a brave attempt aiming to be a parallel currency developed by cultural producers and artists to fund artistic and cultural production.

Without sufficient funds to finance the demand of music bands in Cuiabá (capital of Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil’s Midwest region), the cooperative enterprise Cubo decided to create its own currency–the Cubo Card–which it used to pay bands and in exchange for other services (press releases, website, rehearsal time in the studio etc). « We started distributing Cubo Cards very enthusiastically, particularly as all those who witnessed the experiment we were conducting wanted to be part of it, recognizing its value. By producing Cards, Cards and more Cards, we got to the end of the year and found that a large number of people were requesting their services at once. We had a subprime product! » says one of its creators, Pablo Capilé.

This kind of initiative, regardless of its success or failure, is especially important from a methodological point of view, shifting the debate on the cultural market towards reflection on market culture. However, the most promising attempts in this field may have been by artists who, rather than attempting to create new market formats, have been able to reinvent them, expanding the boundaries of economic thought and practice. By comparing their values and mocking symbols of efficiency, they highlight the authority of their organizational parameters, like the Argentine artist and curator Gustavo Romano in Time Notes, an ongoing project since 2010.

An imaginary currency as a critical device

It is commonly said that time is money, but in the case of Romano’s project, this saying is law. He created a database which allows you to catch up, borrow time and query the database about wasted time. In one year he set up offices for this banking network in Singapore, Berlin, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Madrid and numerous other cities.

The project is an offshoot of a more extensive survey by the artist, the nomad global issue discussion lab known as Pshychoeconomy. Romano exhibited this work at the World Bank building in Washington, where he presented his thesis. The final report on the experience can be read in the e-book Mis 10 Días como Consultor del Banco Mundial, available for download at http://www.timenoteshouse.org/.

Romano’s subtle irony with regards to the financial market has its equivalent in the smaller world of art. After all, very few industries seem to enjoy paying to be criticized as much as art collectors. At least that’s what the work of Brazilian artist Lourival Cuquinha appears to show. He highlights the creation of monetary values in art in several of his projects and dedicates himself to what he calls financial art.

Two of his recent installations explain this relationship: an enormous asterisk consisting of rods made up of five-cent Brazilian Real coins–the lowest-denomination Brazilian coin in circulation–had to go for millions at ArtRio, the Rio de Janeiro art fair, in September 2014. This work was first shown at Cuquinha’s solo show at the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro, in June 2014.

In 2013, the same art fair showed Cuquinha’s Conversion x Machina Bolha Bank (2013), a work that satirized procedures that give art pieces an investment status, placing the financial and art markets on equal footing. In order to achieve this, the artist created a machine based on a banknote vacuum, in which investments in the work were deposited. This investment entitled one to purchase shares guaranteed to multiply tenfold in value if the work was sold.

Each investor also received a wooden plaque signed by Cuquinha, which acted as a share redemption document. The more shares were sold, the more the value of the work went up. Launched in September 2013 at the ArtRio fair, the installation was initially valued at €15,000, a price calculated by multiplying the cost of producing the work (€1,500) by ten. From there, two links between the work and the show were possible. The installation could either be purchased in full for its original price, or those interested in profiting from the sale could purchase shares that were both pieces of the bubble bank and bets on its future sale.

Shares were priced between €17 and €1,000 and represented a refined metaphor for financial market bubbles. The more shares you bought, the more the price of the work went up. Each amount invested in the money vacuum was automatically multiplied by ten, thereby increasing the value of the work. By the end of the Art Fair, the work was worth €80,000.

Money circulation as a political subversion device

Not all artists who deal with money in their works do so to reflect directly on market issues. One of the most important works in the history of Brazilian art, Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos, by Cildo Meireles, is evidence of this. Created in 1970, during the cruelest period of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985), Meireles used it to re-appropriate everyday objects, symbolically modifying them and re-launching them on the market, an example being Coca Cola bottles featuring the printed phrase Yankees go home.

Of all the Inserções, none is more relevant to our discussion than that which had the question “Quem matou Herzog?” (« Who Killed Herzog? ») stamped on Brazilian one cruzeiro notes, the lowest currency value at the time (1970’s). Meireles replicated a ritual that was common in Brazil, particularly among the low income population, which consisted of writing wishes, messages, prayers and promises on banknotes that circulated endlessly. He adopted this Brazilian ritual to question the death of an important political journalist, Vladimir Herzog, who was murdered under torture by the Military Police and whose death was attributed to suicide, showing a forged photograph.

This work recently returned with the question “Onde está o Amarildo?” (« Where is Amarildo? ») stamped on the current lowest-denomination Brazilian banknote, the two real note. A construction worker who disappeared on July 14, 2013, after being stopped by the Polícia Pacificadora (Police Pacification Unit) at the Rocinha slum in Rio de Janeiro, Amarildo’s « disappearance » reintroduces the question at the heart of the work Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: where is the public sphere in Brazil? Who is entitled to it? Which classes are granted the freedom to come and go in Brazil’s public space?

Giselle Beiguelman
published in MCD #76, “Changer l’argent”, déc. 2014 / févr. 2015

Giselle Beiguelman is an artist and professor at the College of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, where she coordinates the Design course.

http://www.desvirtual.com

This article revisits and updates the ideas presented in “A arte de fabricar dinheiro” (“The Art of Producing Money”) and “Daquilo que não se vende” (“That Which is not Sold”), published in the journal SELECT, editions 1 and 14.

(1) August 8, 2014.