Black Givre with Jean-Sébastien Truchy, Fumerolles & Élément Kuuda, Ateliers Belleville, 1 June 2024

There’s an old joke that takes aim at the drive for financial success, a joke that can be adapted to practically any pursuit, especially to art.

Q: How do you make a small fortune? A: Start with a large one.

The mythical U.K. punk band Crass famously emblazoned their albums with labels imploring listeners to “pay no more than £2.00” for this record.

Today, a pristine condition first pressing of the band’s 1979 EP, The Feeding of The Five Thousand, is listed on the aftermarket website Discogs for €300. Plus shipping.

If some suburban-born anarchist-turned-yuppie who washed his feet and got a job working at BlackRock wants to relive the days when he wore a padlock around his neck and a safety pin through his nose and paying €300 for a Crass record will scratch that itch, then Crass records are worth €300 now — for everyone.

The reality of value under capitalism is that things are worth what people will pay for them.

Death Tennis with Manny, Casa del Popolo, 5 June 2024

If you go into an artistic pursuit to make money, you’ve chosen the wrong artform.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Andy Fucking Warhol, a human factory for the production of value and a living commentary on art in the age of its mass reproduction. It doesn’t matter if you’re Damien Fucking Hirst, an embodiment of ostentatious conspicuous consumption, artificial scarcity, and capitalistic overvaluation. It doesn’t matter if you’re Fucking Banksy, an anonymous and collective nonentity that reflects all of us back to us in ironic cartoon-strip fashion.

There is no artform that is more valuable than money. In fact, making money is its own artform — perhaps one of the highest arts there is. Verily, there is an art to transforming labour into capital, the reverse-osmosis process of Marx’s notion of ethereality, in effect, solidifying thin air.

That’s why forgery of currency is such a harshly punished crime. Who dares reproduce that art?

La Majestueuse Symphonie avec Orgue de Saint-Saëns, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 29 May 2024

Quantifying experience is the new fashion to turn time into money, selling audiences occupied time. Still, there is no way to ensure that you’re going to have a good time, regardless of how much money you spend on this or that experience.

You might drop thousands of dollars on dinner and tickets to a show. But your date is in a bad mood, and doesn’t like the wine, and the air conditioning is too cold, and the hairdo of the woman sitting in front of you is too high, and her perfume is too strong, and there’s no intermission — or, there are two intermissions and that’s two too many.

Alternately, you might spend very few dollars and have the time of your life when you spontaneously stop into that little place you’d always been meaning to try, and it is just as cool as you thought it would be, and the bartender gives you an approving nod, the kind of simple and inconsequential gesture that validates you for weeks afterwards, an experience you can call up like a new favourite song to play on repeat when you need a psychic boost. And later, the symphony or the band or the DJ is right in the pocket, and your date glances over sideways at you and smiles, with teeth, because of course you somehow orchestrated this moment.

You never could have planned it, and you certainly never could have bought it. Remember: this fleeting instant is a gift. All that’s required is that you recognize it and understand its intrinsic value and quietly say thank you to God, or the Devil, or the four winds that blow for blowing it in your direction.

Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks, Musée des beaux-arts, 6 June 2024

When you see a beautiful face for the first time, you don’t want to forget it. You’re terrified to lose it. You just want to close your eyes and let persistence of vision take over and imprint that image in memory, or on the insides of your eyelids, forever. The impression of that face becomes a tangible thing, physical, a vision that you can’t and won’t unsee.

When you see the most beautiful face you’ve ever seen for the first time, you might as well tear your own stupid eyeballs out of their bloody sockets, because there is no chance that you will ever see anything so beautiful again. When you’ve seen something — someone — that beautiful, seeing itself becomes obsolete. No blossom in full bloom or priceless painting and certainly no other face is worth looking at twice, and you may even wonder to yourself if you should have ever even seen anything at all.

They say love is blind. The boldest love, though, is a witness to beauty’s smallest detail.

Kee Avil with Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Centre PHI, 30 May 2024

Beauty is in the beholder’s eyes.

But it is humankind that only sees outward beauty. It takes a special kind of perception to seek the true beauty within, the sort of beauty that’s actually worth a damn.

One could lose a mint on cosmetics and surgical intervention to preserve and prolong some ideal notion of physical beauty. Nonetheless, you cannot moisturize rose petals or Botox blueberries. When they start to rot, they assume another incarnation of splendour. There is magnificence, too, in decay.

Enormous fortunes have been wasted in vain attempts to maintain beauty, to capture it for posterity. Napoleon wilted under a heavyweight redingote while waiting for a portrait artist to capture his likeness. We are already nanoseconds older after the camera shutter snaps.

Blessed is the true judge, because justice is merely a matter of time. Fear of time is fear of God. Those who understand this benediction though they may be stricken with poverty and doubt possess within them the greatest of fortunes.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Catarina Ykens II (1659-1737), Vanitas Bust of a Lady, 1688. ©️ The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium. Photographed for NicheMTL.}