“Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular country or socio-economic context, or is easily converted to such a form. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, sometimes, a standard of deferred payment. Any item or verifiable record that fulfils these functions can be considered money.” (Wikipedia entry) Money is a means that enables the exchange of goods to be freed from goods’ mass and volume.  Money is a propellant that aids the economy and human co-existence, that helps to develop ideas, to launch production, to keep life on earth going. But now the financial system has become detached from the economic system and developed a life of its own. As there is a Dark Internet, so there is today a type of Casino Finance Roulette, in which there is gambling in the global world of business and in which ultimately a hundred times, a thousand times the value of one’s own mother, of one’s own house, of one’s own country is thrown away on long-term bets. In German, money and greed alliterate (Geld und Gier); this aligns with the circumstance that greed has become the dominant principle of late-capitalist money-management and conduct. “Mere” merit counts for nothing, these days; “ridiculous profit” is at stake. The digital and algorithmically underpinned power gaming (high-frequency trading) at the stock exchange is increasingly dividing the world into: very rich and poor; the middle is gradually skidding off the road. Evolved conceptions of the world have been altering at great speed for decades. We can speak metaphorically here, without blushing, of the “pornographization of society”, an ever further escalating, radical concentration on the abstraction “money”, with the willingness to do anything for it, even to cheat one’s own country, the entire world (by means of manipulation of the Libor, the reference interest rate) and to get rid of one’s neighbour using the weapon of poverty, if needs be.  

“I think the structural problem”, writes Christina von Braun, “lies in the fact that everyone who has anything to do with money has to cope with a high degree of abstraction. Especially today, where money is just symbols now. The more money they earn, the more they fear – rightly – the moment when money turns out to be an accumulation of zeroes. This fear grows with every new profit, and it – not greed – becomes the actual driving force of striving for more and faster money. Fear is an impetus that makes people the toy of emotions – and with this powerlessness, in turn, grows the need for money.”¹  Rainer Werner Fassbinder titled one of his famous films Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Fear flows like an imaginary acid, inwards, turned onto itself, exactly as it flows outwards – the spreading of fear, of terror out there in the world. 

In the video JJA Gaëlle Boucand documents the self-presentation of a French financial refugee who relocated his domicile to Switzerland almost twenty years ago. On and in his premises JJA, the financial refugee, muses in a sometimes almost surreal-looking portrait on himself, his values, his feel for money, his struggles with lawyers and the Swiss, his love for alarm systems, his fear of being cheated, of being ripped off. 

Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti spent the past two years visiting The Heavens, the world’s heavenly fiscal refuges in which money is hidden from the tax man back home. The British Virgin Islands, with their 28 000 inhabitants, have around 800 000 registered companies. BVI, after Hong Kong, is the second biggest investor in China. There is the real heavy container ship transport on the world’s oceans, and in parallel to that the extremely easy electronic relocation of pre-tax funds to places where no, or very little, tax is imposed. Woods/Galimberti are exhibiting their works in the galleries of Kunsthalle Mannheim, in a round-up of painted portraits of the past century. Glenda Léon shows, with Inversion II (2011) a single-channel and single-frame video in which money – a hundred-dollar bill – is treated and displayed almost like a drug. The dye scraped off the dollar bill with a razor blade is snorted by the actress in the video with the aid of a rolled-up (laurel like) leaf.

G.R.A.M bring the old-new CEOs back to life after the financial crisis with an ironic undertone. They have their hardships, but they have already rediscovered their brash notions of the way the world works. Polly Braden shows in attractive photographs the dynamism, hecticness, but also the boredom or vacuity of people right in the centre of London, in the financial world’s Square Mile. Jules Spinatsch evokes, on a full wall, the German electronics dealer Saturn: Everything is ready for sale, attractively arranged in rows, endless choice, but not a single person seems to find the way in. Ultimate consumerism? The vision of a systemic collapse?

The centre of the works on the topic of “Money and Greed” is the three-part video work by Stefanos Tsivopoulos. Three life stories, three forms of existence – a rich, demented Athens resident in the midst of her realm, her art treasures; a black migrant as a scrap metal collector; an art scout, who is seeking in Athens a new impetus, the ultimate art kick. The three videos on the theme History Zero conjoin in a wonderful way, as through a new commercial form was just being demonstrated. Stefanos Tsivopoulos discusses alternative forms of exchange and interchange in an accompanying written work.