On the Price of Existing
Every age invents its own way of counting the rich. The Florentines had the catasto, the Gilded Age had the social register, the twentieth century had the rich list — a genre of journalism that pretends to be arithmetic. Ours has the algorithmic feed, where wealth is permanently implied and never declared, performed through objects and silences rather than stated in words.
We find this dishonest. Not immoral — dishonest, which is worse, because it is boring.
The Millionaire's Dollar asks for the opposite of performance. Five euros and a handful of characters: initials, a country, a year, one line. No photographs, because photographs lie professionally. No biographies, because biographies are advertisements. No follower counts, because the Wall is not a market.
What remains, when you strip all of that away, is the barest possible public act: a person paying a trivial sum to enter a permanent record, saying only — I exist, and this much is true of me.
The Wall records; it does not interpret.
Why millionaires? Because money is the last taboo of the confessional age. People will tell strangers about their marriages, their illnesses, their childhoods — but ask them what they have, and the room goes quiet. A register of people willing to break that silence, even behind initials, is a cultural document no survey can produce.
Why the honor system? Because verification at five euros would be theatre, and we dislike theatre. The Wall is exactly as honest as the people on it — which makes it, whatever else it is, an accurate portrait.
Why permanent? Because deletion is the native gesture of our era, and permanence is therefore the only remaining provocation. The tile you buy today will outlive your enthusiasm for it. That is the point. A declaration that can be withdrawn at no cost is merely content.
And why anonymous curators? Because the moment this project has a face, it has a marketing strategy. We prefer to remain a function: we keep the record, we tend the Wall, we count.
The project has phases. This is the first, and we will not describe the others here, except to say that those on the Wall will always know before those outside it. We promise nothing further in writing — a register that over-promises becomes a brochure.
Five euros. A few letters. A permanent place in an honest count. It is either the cheapest thing you will ever buy or the most expensive sentence you will ever write. We look forward to finding out which.
— The Curators, MMXXVI