Beautiful Money (some notes on art as currency, art as experience) by Sal Randolph

“Giving it away, not giving it away, is there any difference. Giving it away, not giving it away.” Gertrude Stein [1]

“The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away.” Georg Simmel [2]

“It is essential to the nature of money for the objects into which wealth or value is condensed to be practically useless. . . . This theorum is equally true for modern money (gold) and for archaic money (dogs teeth).” Norman O Brown [3]

“To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of the works of genius.” Arthur Schopenhauer [4]

“This useless thing we expect civilization to value is beauty.” Sigmund Freud [5]

:: Beautiful Money ::

I have on my desk, in a tiny handmade bowl, a piece of candy wrapped in silver. It was a gift: a birthday present from my friend Michael, a gift on the occasion of his birthday, not mine (on his birthday he likes to cook for his friends and give them small presents). The candy is a double gift, part of a piece by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres who made, among other things, works in the form of spills of candy which anyone is invited to take and eat.

When someone buys one of these works what they receive is a piece of paper which gives them permission to exhibit the work and instructions on how to do so. Then they order the candy in bulk, install it in an exhibition space, and allow the public to take it away bit by bit. [6] One thing that's wonderful about this body of Gonzalez-Torres' work was the game he played with collectors: whoever owns one of these pieces owns the obligation to spend their money giving it away.