Buenos Aires' Pagina/12 Newspaper
Radar Section: "A Marked Dollar"
November 25, 2001
No 4674, No 276, Pg 22
Author: -
English Translation of the article is below.
A marked dollar
The New Yorker artist, David Greg Harth, had an idea to lift the spirits of his fellow citizens after the attack of September 11th: to stamp dollar bills with a seal of his creation that defies (challenges, dares), as a recipe for helping themselves, with phrases like "I am not afraid," "I am not terrorized." After stamping each dollar that falls in his hands, he puts it back into circulation: "The objective is to continue doing what I do", says Harth. "Create art, eat out, go to a concert. The terrorists want to kill us by destroying our economy and our productive spirit. This is not going to happen. We will continue being free to play, work, make and spend money." Harth, who made a similar experiment in 1998 with a seal "I am American" (without any apparent patriotic motivation), recruited a legion of friends across the USA with the objective of stamping 100,000 "federal notes." But although the initiative had enthusiasm and looks pretty original, the truth is that it is not so. As we all know, the governor of the Buenos Aires province, Carlos Ruckauf, decided to take a huge quantity of paper money (blank paper) and stamped different seals, like those of Dardo Rocha, and put them into circulation by the tens of thousands. It is clear that so far we are winning, but: When will the seal "I am afraid" be stamped?