…Today (several years ago now actually) I made something. I think. I gave $1000 to two acquaintances. I want to call them artists but I am not sure they would want to be identified that way, so narrowly that is. They are people though, I know that, and I like them. So I gave them $1000, my gesture beginning at a bank teller’s window and ending with an unceremonious passing of bills from my hand to theirs. I asked for nothing in return knowing it would be a difficult request to honor.
…What they did was inevitably implicated by my gesture and part of me wants to claim their experiences and work as mine; bought and paid for; the part of me that demands what the privilege of money always demands. But I don’t, at least not out loud, because I don’t know how to separate the parts that have to do with money from the parts that don’t. Money does funny things.
…I like that $1000 creates difficulties; between giver and receiver, me and you, art and commodity, and that in those relations there is a structure against which something else can be made. Art? I don’t know.
