What can be said about the relationship between a business company and Culture? Even better: how can be analyzed, if it exists, the relationship between Culture and Business? Today we have two very prestigious personality talking for us: Cesare Pietroiusti, artist and Carlo Sini, the most important Italian contemporary philosopher. I would ask Cesare to start first.
Ok thank you. Hi everybody. This is a real contemporary question. Well..I believe an artist is person that moves his personality among different techniques, various themes and new worlds. Today’s artist should be interdisciplinary in his works. I like to think the artist as the one who can’t do anything and so potentially, he can be able to do everything. He takes risks, shows up, experiences. Economy is a land where rules and laws are clearly stated and they don’t transcend the human being rather they’re part of it.
I want to show you some of the projects I’ve realized recently in Birmingham at the Ikon Gallery.
First of all, the performance called Enriching Money. In a mammoth 24 hours stint I cooked as a proper Chef, at the Cafè in the Gallery some Itlaian dishes, not particularly unusual but quite good in quality. When guests have finished their meals, they received an equivalent value of the various dishes they ordered in cash. Unlike the normal why of eating out and paying what you order, there people were paid for eating.
Another time I organized a real auction, well..a money auction named Eating Money. I was not by myself but there was Paul Griffiths with me, another artist I work with. People were invited to bid different amount of money and we ate the banknotes correspondent the highest bid. Upon swallowing the money we waited for the notes to be naturally evacuated. Afterwards, we clean them..and returned them to the original owner with a certificate signed by us two and authentic.
I also studied various way for transforming money. I studied scientific processes, natural changes, chemical reactions and I guarantee the most effective substance is sulphuric acid! Don’t try it! As I said, in this situation too, I created a performance call How to Irreversibly Transform Money.
Last but not least: Money Washing. This project has been really funny and quite interesting because we tried to play with time-money idea, the attention-time we dedicate to money and so on. We occupied a disused shop in Birmingham’s city centre where visitors participated in a money watching exercise in which members of the public were asked to concentrate on a crisp £20 note. Their attention was the value they had to use for buying the banknote. They could claim it only when I considered their attention enough.
So..this is a kind of panoramic of my artistic job and my little experiments..I hope to have been enough clear and not too boring!!
Thanks Cesare.
This is a reproduction of the conversation took place on Saturday 15th November 2008 during Art for Business Forum. Cesare Pietroiusti, artist Valeria Cantoni, creator and curator of the forum
Next Tuesday you’ll read Carlo Sini’s answer!
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