Arnold Mario Dall’O

money eat soul

coming soon

Can’t eat money

Art can’t just wash its hands. Hunger is on the increase in our world, the prices of maize, rice and wheat have tripled in one year and there are populations that already live on next to nothing and can’t live on literally nothing. The rice-producing countries are increasing the duty on exports so as to avert rioting at home, civil war: one can die of hunger, one can also kill. Meanwhile in our neck of the woods famous food salons like Cibus in Parma, are fêting works of art where landscapes are composed of food items like hams and salmon. But even here in our parts the threshold of poverty is inching nearer. This year the slogan was “A world of food around you”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Years ago the FAO declared war on poverty. The opposite might be more appropriate: declare war on wealth.
The world looks like a huge discount store being pillaged, while at auction rooms works by forty or fifty year-old artists are going for figures not even a Caravaggio has ever fetched. Does art really stand apart from the world?
Such will have to be our conclusion; the difference defeats the understanding, this vast flow of money on fairly unnecessary things for life. Money eats the soul, or rather has already done so. Only economic terms apply: the question, what’s it worth? Meaning money-wise, not how important the work may be in present-day art. Without getting on his high horse, Arnold Dall’O is here positing a comparison with a great contemporary art biennale, like Manifesta 7 and putting forward a statement: not a question, mind. Questions don’t come into it, that’s already been done.
“Money is round and slips through the fingers,” Goethe used to say; the important thing is to have it. A growing feature of today’s world is the concentration of wealth in remarkably few hands. A hundred Scrooges may suffice, the rest are onlookers at this extraordinary feast. Everyone scans the Forbes statistics to see the richest lords of the earth, wealth being entertainment. The figures famous pictures are fetching are now so high the mind loses track. 100 million for a Bacon, no, perhaps a touch less, anyway by now even the collective imagination is running away with itself. Art is more and more a phenomenon, less and less an experience.
The subtile slices of bread being distributed are food pure and simple. Wheat, plain wheat. Nourishment for the body and hence for the spirit. Whereas one can’t eat money. To build up our souls we must start from this simple gesture in which we feed off something that bonds us with other people. Money eats the soul, which hence needs restoring to a dignity to which mere money cannot attain. But we also feed off information: how often news fails to get through, or gets dated, blanked out by the trivia we are persuaded to hear or read! Surely art cannot conform to this reality-occulting system, this system where scoops are all the rage because scoops are easy to place on the information market? In the present instance nothing is being sold. subtile slices of bread are being handed out for free with some informations. Arnold Dall’O hereby takes his stand in a great protest movement demanding we seek beyond (or inside) the mechanisms producing art at this moment in history. Where art is heading, we cannot say; so let’s concentrate on who is actually gobbling it up.
If the only paradigm is money, then even those seeking to understand would seem to be debarred. The soul itself has a price – we have known that for centuries – only man used to barter it for something extraordinary: a closer station to God, a glimpse of immortality, achieving the superhuman sublime. Now the question has changed: you buy tout court, and money metabolizes the object, removes it from all talk of barter, robs it of all worth.
By its very nature the performance is fraught with a very real danger. It seeks to surprise, to achieve the unexpected. Money underlies everything, everything is convertible, everything has a price one can name or withhold. But suppose such were not the case; suppose for a fleeting second we tried thinking by another term of reference. And that art itself was that paradigm… Something that just cannot be bartered…
Amid his utopias Ezra Pound realized that money was the source of most, if not all, evil. Pound lived at Brunnenburg close to Merano, at the foot of the Dorf Tirol. Some such utopia may explain why we think this artistic operation is a useful one. It makes us all think, even for a few seconds, or maybe many hours.

Valerio Dehò

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