- Chapman brothers offer to draw on any form of currency with the Queen’s head on it for free.
- Collectors, critics and show-offs hand over crisp ne’er before used £20 note.
- Artists hand over a £10 one.
- and students £5
- Chapman’s draw 100 (-ish) of these a day over 4 days.
- £4,800 (at a £12 average) is removed from circulation and effectively spent on an artwork which no one has paid for.
All is history
I like to listen to the radio late at night, after midnight, during the graveyard shift. Currently I am enjoying listening to the economic lullaby. I find it oddly soothing every night hearing earnest and soothing voices as they report on the latest volatility in the markets and deliver the news of further falls in the stock exchange. Schadenfreude? Perhaps, but someone has to sleep soundly throughout all of this. Inevitability is a great comforter.
Then I have a dream and it goes like this: “There is always another way”. There are thousands of alternatives, although there are those, and there have always been those who would have you believe otherwise. The assumption they made and had us believe was that “There Is No Alternative“, no alternative to the problems upon which the capitalist economic system may from time to time create and upon which it might stumble. This is a mantra that the beacons of neo-liberal economics have spent years chanting. The rest of the world was nothing but a function of their will – a world made in a vision of their greed: of economics and for economics. And until now that is how it was. Like the chants of high modernism, the sweeping aim was to universalise, to create an hermetic economic singularity and to maintain a status quo to end all history. Of course there were no alternatives – their will be done and was done. All is history. I wish.