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Eero’s Error: Paying the Bill without Money. Framer Mag. 2# (2011)

Note: This text and its epilogue are available as a zine named GASTROECONOMY distributed by markpezinger.de. Download the .pdf, print it and assemble it into a booklet. Link to download.

How do you behave in a place like this? I arrive an hour before my guests and get a seat at a table in the center of the restaurant. It’s a fancy place, where employees open doors to the toilets. The staff act so polite that I’m afraid to ask for service. The arrival of my guests is a relief, since they educate me on how to call for waiters in a polite but effective manner. This evening is my threat. Most of the party already know my plan, and the rest catch the drift soon. My walled is safe at home and I only have a hand-written letter containing a proposal with me. I don’t intend to pay for what we have. We start with cranberry drinks.

Rumors circulating mouth to mouth talk of others, who invited friend for dinner. After a long, moist night, the host noticed he’d “forgotten my wallet home”, and hence could not pay for the bill. This person was an artist, and after some negotiation with the owners, he whipped up a sketch pad, and drew a portrait to cover the expenses with a unique artwork. Such stories make artist proud of being artist. They prove that it’s possible to use creative power to bend the reality of economics. Depending on who tells the story the hero can be a poet, journalist, designer or a composer. As the story goes, these works form the basis of art collections you see on the walls of respectable restaurants. Historians I consulted where unanimous that such trade has taken place in the past, and locally in Helsinki the last time such stories spread was in the 70’s.

Some such stories are mentioned in artist autobiographies, and there is apparently an art dealer, who owns a work by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, which was originally used as payment for restaurant depts. I bet it’s hung on the dining room wall. When asked, establishments rumored to have been engaged in art-to-food trades in the past started by reassuring that they have receipts for all the transactions. Proved true the rumor would reveal that the collection of fine art are based on shady contracts with drunken painters. Respected restaurant remain silent to protect the privacy of those clients and themselves. I couldn’t get any restaurants to confirm any trade of this kind. All speculations would be best tested trough a re-enactment.

Ordering a meal you cannot affair to pay for is like base jumping. After talking the first bite you have to go all in, and the closer you are to the end of the journey, the more delightful everything tastes. The more precise the fantasies of how I would be dragged to the counter, the more sensitive our taste buds. All the excitement made me eat like a horse. When looking at the wine lists we covered up the prices and tried to choose wines based on their names. Judging the wines’ quality is hard without knowing the price. Menus seem to be categories by prices, with the expensive ones at the bottom of the list. With such hints and deduction skills we found something suitable to drink. During dessert I felt humbles every bite is a gift I did not deserve. The dinner was a perfect tragedy – everyone in our company knew how it would end.

I send my friends away to a bar on the next block. I called for the head waiter, and explained the idea of offering art in exchange for the dinner. I briefly recapped the local history of such arrangements. The head waiter smiled until he realized I was for real. He clenched to my letter and read it over and over. My interpretation was that he sympathized with the idea and that we were equally afraid of how the corporate owners would threat the proposal. He explained that its against company policy to invoice, especially as it’s illegal to sell alcohol on credit. He send me on my way and I tipped the guy who opens doors for good karma.

Three weeks later I reviewed an invoice for the sum of 503,40€ printed on fine paper. I framed it.

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Eero’s Error: Selling myself on Facebook, Framer Mag. 1# (2011)

Selling art is about selling the self. By buying art audiences fulfill hidden desires, take part in exotic adventures and promote politics their own status would not permit. Owning someone’s work is the safest way to participate in their life story. Much like in the stock markets, the brand is in focus and what the artist says in public affects the value. Investments in living artists are risky – we inevitably blurt out something to devalue the brand. The internet makes protecting the personal brand difficult since audiences have access to behind the scenes status updates, which prove people are equally foolish. Because of this, smart netizens on Facebook use clever puns as names that leave the uninitiated out of the loop, while avoiding insults caused by rejected “friendship requests”. As I decided to join this smart class, I had to decide what to do with my existing profile. It’d become socially toxic waste. There is no social etiquette to retreating from social media. I decided to do as all corporation stuck with toxic waste: I started to trade with it.

Selling virtual good like World of Warcraft accounts is an expanding industry, so there definitely is a marked for my product. Imagine a Japanese school girl using a bearded Finnish mans Facebook profile in a live-action role-play scenario. I settled for the price of 1,143€ per friend, so I would get 450 euros for 392 friends. I placed a screen capture of my profile page on the Finnish eBay, Huuto.net, and went to bed fantasizing of profits. In the morning, I regretted what I’d done and told friends about it. Instead of being offended, they liked it and started bidding. The only ones objecting my sale were Facebooks Terms of Service – as a Huuto.net clerk told me after removing my ad. I also found out that creative traders had long been selling Facebook profiles, when I found online threads from early 2007. I dug deeper and got into a conversation with a trader.

Colleenaoanton: so u need profile?
Me: Jep. With some 500 friends. Possibly with EU identity
Colleenaoanton: ya, okey. I will show u now.
Me: Send me a screenshot if you have one. How much?
Colleenaoanton: 5€ per 100 friends.
Me: Ok. I’ll contact you after lunch.

There are possibly millions of virtual characters and identities for sale out here. Because of the quantity, there are bound to be situations where these “virtual characters” played by viral marketing company employees or bots end up selling Viagra for each others. Potent tradesmen.

A surprising consequence of my attempt to sell my Facebook profile was that I gained more friends. My value is rising. My puny attempts is nothing compared to the man who placed all of his belongings on Huuto.net with the promotional slogan: “When the stuff’s sold, I’ll leave were the palm-trees grow”. He eventually sold everything for 44 007€. As people focused on the hero of the story, the guy who bought the other man’s life has remained silent. He simply continued the game where the other logged off.

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Fade in, fade out – Kasino Creative Annual: About Hair. (2010)

I have a pubic hair growing in my arm. I begun thinking about hair transplants, and things just started rolling…

In the beginning, as a kid, I kept hair and fingernails that I’d cut off. For me it was like playing NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, because I’d seen a documentary where they analyzed a strand of hair cut while he was imprisoned in Saint Helena, and the hair revealed NAPOLEON had been poisoned with arsenic. The same method of analysis revealed WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART took cocaine. I stored a lock of my hair in a matchbox in case somebody poisoned me. The matchbox is still in my childhood home.

My son is just over a year, and because of him I got to know my Dad again. When I think of my Dad I think of old photographs, where he has a thick beard. So it was a shock to meet him, because he now has some skin disease and all his hair has fallen off except for a few thin hairs that grow on his head. When I’m in photos with my son, I think of those old pictures of my Dad. I hope my son will also grow a beard. At least he’ll have someone to teach him to shave.

A beard is something you get when you grow up. If you want to know how someone will look when they’re grown up, you can put some shaved off facial hair on a child’s chin and cheeks. I sometimes spread hairs from my beard on my bald scalp for the opposite reason: it takes me back to my youth.

When I was a kid there was a rumor that if you had a haircut and hairs fell on your back, they would start growing there. The theory was based on an other story: someone had a bad burn on their hand, and a skin transplant was done from their butt. Everything went well but the hair came with the skin – there were thicker darker butt hairs growing on the hand.

Could this happen on purpose? If I took out a pube and installed it in my arm, would it grow? Why a pube? Maybe I want to linger forever in memories of my puberty. Next I came up with an innovation: by transplanting hairs you could make a hair tattoo. Write the name of you dearest on your back out of hair. The problem is I’m hairy all over, so it wouldn’t show.

Once I saw a man who had been given hair implants surgically. It’ll be common in the future. Hairs were snipped from the back of his head and planted on the top. They grew in neat lines like ryegrass. This guy is about sixty and he has ryegrass growing on his head. These days wigs are considered pretentious as if unreal hair gives mocking rights. That’s why tits are nowadays enhanced with silicone implanted under the skin, whereas 300 years ago some padding would do.

What is pretentious, is that surgically build hair is considered more credible than a wig. How long can you live with a new acquaintance without revealing the truth about your implants? Our with old fried noticing? It doesn’t matter what others think. Just like with fake boobs, there’s a game going on with hair implants: when everyone knows they’re fake you can think about them more.

A friend of mine can’t grow a beard, but like everyone who can’t, he thinks he’d like to. It would be great if I could give my friend a beard or a hair tattoo trough a surgical operation. Which gets me thinking whether I could ask for hairs from all kinds of geniuses. I could plant them on my head and see if some of their talent were transplanted with their hairs.

I wrote to plastic surgeon ROLF NORDSTRÖM and asked if it was possible to implant someone’s hair on another persons head. Soon after I sent the email, his assistant called me aback politely, and explained one would need to take the same medication as those going trough organ transplants – if such a thing were done, as it might be in the future. She also consoled me that you can move your own hair from wherever to wherever, and mentioned that a man had had chest hair transplanted on this head. Imagine, somewhere in the world is a man with chest hair growing on his head.

Whereas barbers remove hair, plastic surgeons add them. NORDSTRÖM is the anti-barber. The two profession use very similar tools, both serve and influence beauty aspirations and the well-being go the client – and in fact plastic surgeon create new clients to barbers.

The plastic surgeon’s assistant was clear from the start that hair transplants would cost me more than my annual earnings. But as with the coolest tattoos, the coolest hair transplants are self-made. All you need is a sharp needle and a magnifying glass (getting the needle was the hard part, because pharmacies just assume you’ll do drugs).

I cut the skin, picked the hair – follicle and all – and planted it in my arm. I hacked the methods form NORDSTRÖM’S assistant. I succeeded after several attempts off trying to push the hair in with the needle and after losing several of my pubic hair somewhere on the flooer. If the transplant was successful the pube would fall after two weeks and a new one will grow in it stead. I also borrowed my beard to my beardless friend – he treated it with a lack of respect like it was a joke beard, and just let it fall to the bar floor. I’ve moved on to thinking about making a tail, NORDSTRÖM could ransplant hairs to make one. That would be something to gawk at the gym locker rooms.

In the future this kind of things will be possible. Fake hair will be more difficult to spot from real hair. Curious kids will be unable to reveal SANTAS beard as a fake, because it’ll be surgically implanted on the face of who ever is playing him. The curly white beard will have been grown on the ass of a gene-manipulated rat and transplanted for the holidays to make SANTA real.

Edit. Jonathan Mander.