Art, alchemy and central banking
You can learn all you need to know about macroeconomics from Salvador Dali’s advert for Chupa Chups
“Liking money like I like it,” said Dali, “is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.“
The two stories I hear most often about artists and money are about Picasso and Salvador Dali.
The Picasso story is that he knocks out a sketch on the back of a napkin in five minutes and asks X thousand pounds for it. The astonished customer says you can´t ask X thousand for five minutes work. Picasso replies that it took him a lifetime to learn how to draw something like that in five minutes.
The Dali story:
“…[Dali] was known to take huge parties of friends and students out for dinner and then when the bill came, he would write a check for the entire meal. However, as the waiter watched, Dali would quickly sketch something on the back of his check. Knowing that the restaurant owner would never cash such a valuable piece of art, Dali basically wrote his own money, and cleverly avoided a large dinner bill.” (from Art Experts website)
I like the Dali story best of all.
There are plenty of artists who toy with money as a subject matter and as a medium. Incorporating money into art can be a short-cut to meaningfulness.
But Dali didn’t just borrow money’s meaningfulness — he short-circuited it. The front of his cheque relies on a huge and intricate banking system in order for it to ´work´. The back of the cheque (where he scribbled his little sketch) trumped the front — and relied only on Dali.
The value of money relies on our belief that it is valuable. And banks can only create money because we believe they can. (And when they start trying to create more money than we believe they can create… then everything goes crunch.) So Dali pulled the same trick. He managed to get himself into the position where he could essentially create money out of thin air just because people believed that he could. How did he do that?
I imagine that Dali saw money as art. I imagine he saw the creation of money as an artistic act and saw himself as an artist who was more than capable of performing that artistic act. Like becoming a one-man central bank.
It’s not only Salvador Dali who’s pulled the “Can I pay for this in paintings?” trick. Jackson Pollock is said to have bartered away his bar tab and Marcel Duchamp drew his way out of a dentist´s bill. The “scribbling on the back of cheques” story has also been attributed to Picasso. And even Oasis tried a similar trick recently when sending out refunds for a concert that was delayed. The two Gallagher brothers signed all of the cheques themselves, hoping fans would hold on to the cheques as souvenirs, rather than cashing them.
But maybe (I have to say maybe as this is my own personal hunch and not based on any kind of authoritative knowledge of Dali’s life or works)… maybe you could look at Dali’s career and say that he was more interested in making money than in making art. Not “making money” as in trying to acquire a lot of it (though he did do that), but actually perfecting the art of creating money from scratch.
Fellow surrealist André Breton gave Dali the nickname “Avida Dollars” (an anagram of Salvador Dali that (sort of) translates as “eager for dollars”).
And Dali´s passion for pursuing a capitalist lifestyle and readiness to commercialise his art put him at odds with artists more sceptical of money and business, and certainly seems to have been one of the things that distanced him from the rest of the Surrealist movement.
(Surely seeing what happens when Disney and Dali cross paths is worth six and a half minutes of your time? Watch it now. It’s beautiful.)
He appeared on What’s My Line?
He designed the logo for Chupa Chups lollies:
And an ashtray for Air India:
~~INTERMISSION~~
This article will continue after a series of television commercials.
Dali appeared in a (fantastic) TV advert for Lanvin chocolate:
And with the New York Yankees´ Whitey Ford in an advert for Braniff International Airways:
…The Hotel Saint Regis:
And Alka Seltzer:
“Alka Seltzer is a work of art. Truly one of a kind. Like… Dali!”
~~ END OF INTERMISSION ~~
As Dali’s fame increased, his commercial appeal as an artist increased (to the dismay of plenty of art critics) and this increased his ability to ‘write’ money out of thin air.
The culmination of this would be signing thousands of blank sheets of printing paper and canvases, so that they could later be turned into ‘Dali’ paintings by other people. It has been claimed that an ageing Dali was forced to sign blank canvases by his guardians, in order for them to be used after his death. It’s also been suggested he signed literally hundreds of thousands of blank sheets.
“Dali himself frequently admitted he had made enormous sums of money by signing hundreds of quick sketches and lithographs which would then sell for thousands of pounds. He once famously remarked: “Each morning after breakfast I like to start the day by earning $20,000.” (from this article from the Independent)
Regardless of the exact details of who signed what when, I like to imagine that Dali would have been delighted with this desecration of the artist´s integrity in the name of earning great wads of cash in an instant.
“Liking money like I like it,” said Dali, “is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.”
When asked what he loved most in life, Dali replied, “Money. Le idea of money.”
Of course, Salvador Dali would say all kinds of things… It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a man who’ll take his anteater out for a walk or fill a Rolls Royce with 500 kilos of cauliflower might also say “outrageous” things about money.
But I don’t think it was Dali the Surrealist mischief-maker that was making these statements about money. I think it was Dali actually talking honestly about the nature of his work. I think it was Dali the alchemist.
Alchemy was a recurrent theme for the Surrealists. Though most commonly known as “attempts to turn base metals into gold”, alchemy has a long and strange history touching on all kinds of areas of science, craftsmanship, research, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics and entrepreneurship.
If you start from the ‘turning lead into gold’ thing, then you can class alchemists as people who were willing to attempt the impossible. This put them in a special position as sources of innovation in the medieval world. And their willingness to draw on any discipline, any source of knowledge, without being constrained by a particular guild or university made them into a kind of entrepreneurial ‘free agent’. And that led to dukes and kings across Europe becoming patrons to alchemists, seeking the “combination of intellectual, religious, medicinal, technical, and economic skills that alchemists had to offer”. From Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire by Tara Nummedal:
“Alchemy played [an important role] in the economy of central Europe, for alchemists’ work placed them firmly in the midst of the worldly negotiations of contracts, commerce, and state formation..Princes and financial elites were the most visible consumers of this entrepreneurial alchemy…”
“Traditional alchemical texts presented the image of the alchemist as scholar, prophet, and artisan, a figure who combined divine revelation, study, and laboratory practice to produce both philosophical knowledge and useful products.”
I think this kind of rigorous approach to the impossible is the thread that made the Surrealists natural heirs to the alchemists. ME Warlick´s book “Max Ernst and Alchemy” spells out the role played by alchemy for the Surrealists:
“In the Second Manifesto André Breton commented that the goals of the surrealists were not unlike those of the medieval alchemists in their search for the elusive Philosopher’s Stone….The occult revival, and its associated popularization of alchemy, profoundly affected the development of surrealism…” (a preview of the book is available on Google Books)
Though Max Ernst was the main focus of the Surrealist / Alchemist crossover, alchemy also cropped up increasingly frequently in Dali’s work. He painted a beautiful series of 10 lithographs entitled “The Alchemy of the Philosophers” for an incredibly elaborate ‘book’ project (shown recently at the Dali Museum in Florida).
Explaining the chess set he made (where the pieces were casts of his own fingers), Dali said:
“I had a precise and yet symbolic concept,” he said. “In chess, as in other forms of human alchemy, there is always the creator, above all, the artist as creator. It is this that I wanted represented: the hand of the artist, the eternal creator. How better to express this vision than by sculpting my own hand, my own fingers?”
So, Dali was influenced by and interested in alchemy. But where did he choose to express his thoughts on alchemy most plainly? Perfectly, wonderfully, characteristically… it was in an advert for a bank:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx9s3OFzMm8
The advert took the form of a seven-inch flexi-disc that the French commercial bank CCF sold in its branches. As part of the flexi-disc he wrote a poem The Apotheosis of the Dollar (apotheosis: “the exaltation of a subject to a divine level” ). The poem shares its title with a painting he made two years earlier (full title: “Salvador Dali in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar in which You Can See on the Left Marcel Duchamp Masquerading as Louis XIV behind a Vermeerian Curtain which Is the Invisible Face, but Monumental, of Hermes by Praxiteles”.)
The Apotheosis of the Dollar
Named by an anagram by Andre Breton:
Avida Dollars
An anagram that had been made with somewhat evil intent
Believing it would irritate me.
On the contrary, it was the magic word
That has meant that since that moment
Dollars have rained on my head like a truly divine diarrhea.
Which means that when I fall asleep at night
I am ever more surrounded by satisfaction
Because there is nothing in the world
That bring me as much satisfaction
As feeling this monotonous and divine rain of dollars.
But there is another side that will amuse the people listening to me
That no less than Auguste Comte, the great French philosopher,
At the moment of inventing his new positivist religion
Had said, before starting this religion:
“It is essential that we were able to count on the bankers”
Gold is something apotheosic
And it proves that without bankers there is no religion
The entire Middle Ages were based on the transmutation of base material into gold
Since the only way of spiritualising matter
Is to aurify it.
Gold, as much as something that derives from gold
Derives from its e-spiritual power.
And in a world in which there is more and more impotence
It is really essential that the gold that is reconstituted as this bar of Jase
Reaches from the vile earth to the heavens through the transmutation of gold.
(This is just my approximate translation. You can read the original text of the poem in French HERE )
I think it’s so exciting to think that the one thing that one of the 20th Century’s most fascinating artists might have aspired to was the art of being a banker. When I hear the word “banking” to me it sounds like something so mundane. Like “filing” or “storing”. As if it was the most normal, unspectacular thing that someone could be involved in.
But when you look at the chaos and upheaval in the world that has spiralled from a ‘banking crisis’,
when you think of the ways in which banking is intertwined with all of our lives every day,
when you think of the mountainous bonuses,
when you listen to This American Life’s report from inside the room in the Federal Reserve where a small group of people have the power to create a trillion dollars out of thin air and then spend it….
…well, then it seems entirely unreasonable to think of it as mundane and entirely reasonable to think of it as a quite spectacular art. How could you not call the ability to conjure up huge quantities of money out of nothing “alchemy”?
So, just imagine if that mysterious art practised by central bankers and policymakers — the art they aspire to perfecting — might be the same art that Dali aspired to? What if we could call the whole thing alchemy?
Devastatingly successful currency speculator, financier, businessman, trader, philanthropist George Soros (AKA “the man who broke the Bank of England”) called the whole thing alchemy.
Soros’ book “The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market”describes his own practice as an investor as a “real-time experiment…an exercise in financial alchemy”, which he goes on to explain:
“The course of events cannot be determined by scientific method; but it can be shaped by the methods of alchemy…”
“Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired stare of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is the truth — that of alchemy, operational success.”
“In the sphere of natural phenomena, there is no distinction between the two objectives. Nature obeys laws that operate independently of whether they are understood or not; the only may man can bend nature to his will is by understanding and applying these laws. That is why alchemy has failed and natural science reigns supreme.”
“But social phenomena are different: they have thinking participants. Events do not obey laws that operate independently of what anybody thinks. On the contrary, the participants thinking is an integral part of the subject matter. This creates an opening for alchemy that was absent in the sphere of natural science. Operational success can be achieved without attaining scientific knowledge. By the same token, scientific method is rendered just as ineffectual in dealing with social events as alchemy was in altering the character of natural substances.”
Just as money and banking has never really been about gold (but about the values that we project onto that particular yellow, soft metal), the kind of alchemy Soros is interested in (and, I would say, the kind of alchemy Dali was interested in) was never really about gold either.
I love to think that we’ve got to a point where the greatest bankers and the greatest artists may ultimately share the same ambitions and practice. That Soros and Dali might have been digging into the same mysteries and experimenting and learning and playing with every art and science they could lay their hands on in order to try to devise some kind of a practice that works — unlocking the secrets and the power of money creation. Dali gives us The Alchemy of the Philosophers. Soros single-handedly crashes the UK’s economy.
So, what happens if we remove the line between art and money? Between artists and bankers? What if we call them all alchemists? If we embrace the whole of art and the whole of banking and call the whole thing “alchemy”?
Perhaps, we’ll get artists who, rather than playing with banknotes and their appearances, or playing with the value of their own works, instead make an art out of playing with the nature of the market as a whole. Playing with the nature of money.
And, maybe, economics can undergo its own alchemical transformation — from a “dismal science” to a joyful art.
www.charlesdavies.com
