Capital: abstract entity that consensus reality has agreed shall be the Ultimate Power, charged with determining each human’s worth and destiny, as well as decreeing where, how, and under what circumstances, if any, imagination, emotion, curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and the exploration of consciousness A) exist at all; or B) have value if acknowledged to exist; and C) who will have access to them in those moments when they officially exist with value; and D) under what guidelines and restrictions approved practitioners will be able to indulge imagination, creativity, curiosity, et al, and toward what ends.

-Dr. Laurie Weeks, I Went to Find Some Kunst and All I Got Was This Lousy Kapital

In the space between capital- filthy lucre, piles of cash, call it what you will—and the object, lies the relationship between maker of things and consumer of things. Though this relationship is largely invisible because it vibrates at a wavelength no longer detectable by the modern, well-trained human sensorium, it’s nonetheless fraught, seething, and thermonuclear in its power precisely by virtue of remaining unconscious and unacknowledged.

A.L. Steiner’s 1 Million Photos, 1 Euro Each (minimum order) is an installation delineating the collection of 1,000,000 photographic objects. Items are purchased, traded, displayed, shared, valued, and exploited; artists act as fabricators, collectors as heirs. In order to redefine this relationship beyond purchasing power, Steiner frames the absurd impulses of both photography and consumerism as a contractual commitment, offering an evolving life-long installation & interpersonal relationship at a cost of only €1,000,000.

An archive of 1,000,000 photos will be offered piecemeal throughout the lifetime of the artist and collector in order to define the act of storytelling via the capitalist relationship. Defining the role of the collector as a privileged position, the artist offers dialogue, evolution and the availability of a continuous, pulsating photographic record- in totality- until the end comes.

Look at the works as aesthetic and also as a record that bleeds beyond image, well into the weight of history. Do all things possess actuality, existence and essence in both life and death? Perhaps nowhere than In the relationship between maker and consumer-with all its chaotic longings, losses, petty thieveries, paranoia, inappropriate crushes, gratuitous double-crossings, stalkings, gossip, and just generalized pandemonium (resulting from confusion about the nature of reality and perhaps an unfortunate choice of shoes)-can we more clearly see the entire tragedy of the human condition being played out. In real time we all have good intentions, but with strings attached.