Fiona Ní Mhaoilir asked me to improve an artwork of hers, or two to be precise. She told me how she, completely spontaneously, had bought two lottery tickets in a news agents just because everyone else waiting in the line before her had done so. They had been duds of course, and resolved to get some kind of benefit out of them she glued them to canvases and turned them into paintings.

Didn’t win a million and didn’t sell for a million…

So, how do you repair someone else’s artwork? I decided to not continue along her premise, but rather to make it about her premise. Depressingly enough, whenever I meet other artists, the talk soon turns to money. Obviously since non of us has any, and we all try to think of these different schemes for getting money. I think we are acting out of a fallacy. Artists don’t make money because they figure out some clever or special way to make artworks, they make money because their gallerist or art dealer is well connected and knows how to present their work. And what do we artists know about money anyway? So why ask another artist for advice in financial matters? Marcel Mauss famously defined Magic as a social phenomenon that works because, and only if, the whole of the group agreed to act as if magic worked, which by the way also nicely describes money (as pointed out by several clever scholars), and also, in my opinion, to a very high degree the value ascribed to art works. I wanted to tie in to this notion of money as magic, because I think a lot of artists (myself included) easily fall victim to wishful (and even magical) thinking when it comes to financial success.

If I can’t have it…

I can’t bring myself to believe, however, that any kind of rituals or self affirmations can make you rich (as an artist, maybe it works for ad guys and car dealers, where at least there is some money floating around to start with), but maybe, since we are all experts at being poor, our real powers would lie in the ability to spread poverty and failure.

…no one else shall either.

Even if my magic can’t help Fiona become rich and successful, maybe at least it will allow her to share her misfortunes with others, deserving of it or not.

Object no. 30