Money can only circulate freely in a realm of continual disappointment - the reproduction of scarcity is the production of wealth. Awareness must be privatized - thought must be appropriated, adulterated, alienated, packaged, labelled, advertized and sold back to consciousness. All informational media from education to advertizing are dedicated to detaching the image from any mooring in experienced life, floating it free, and rematerializing it in commodification. Work, consume, die. So-called primitives would say that soul is being stolen here, that meaning itself has entered a field of decay, a sort of beam emanating from an evil eye or withered self eaten by envy of all significance.
Reciprocity reaches a vanishing point in such patterns of depredation.
But the comparison might prove invidious - inasmuch as the artist's intention is to add meaning to the sum total of experience, not to subtract or abstract it. The gesture art makes presupposes the gesture of reciprocity, of presence. This movement is interrupted by the essentially non-human intervention of Capital, the exacerbated mediation of a power that can only grow by creating scarcity and separation. We do not need the artist to live for us, but simply to be our facilitator, our companion, part of our circle of reciprocity - and as for art, if there exists any way for it to avoid being englobed, we can see it only as a form of opposition to the One Big World of unified representation. Such art refuses to become part of the Grand Unified Theory of the end of physics or history or the minimum wage or anything else.