Related: Money From Below — Rent, wages, bills, broke-ness and daily material pressure are separated from commerce-as-aesthetic-material.

Money as pressure

Characters rarely encounter “the economy” as an abstraction. They encounter a condo that can be lost, money owed to dangerous people, a job that no longer values a skill, a payout too small to justify the labor, a parent who dies before being repaid, or the blunt fact that attention can be converted into money while love cannot be cleanly separated from exchange.

Work and competence

The work is unusually interested in the difference between having a role and being able to do it. Wrestlers, artists, technicians, obsolete experts, promoters, content creators and institutions are repeatedly judged by whether they can perform the function beneath the title. This makes labor a moral and aesthetic subject as much as an economic one.

Price versus value

Luxury, cheapness, public goods, merch, art objects and “operational beauty” all complicate the equation between expense and worth. The corpus can be hostile to prestige while remaining fascinated by quality, craft, money, status and the forms through which resources become usable experience.

Selected works

Crossings

Commerce / Conversion as Composition · Operational Beauty · Function / Defunction / Refunction · Money / labor / class quotations