The Banker

You know the situation. Your supplier got arrested, your stash is gone, and you’re standing around broke wondering what to do next. This is where Francesco Moracchini’s machine comes in. It’s called the MO-CLEAN/14, but people know it as The Banker.

The whole thing is a dark joke. Supposedly you feed it money and it scrapes cocaine off the notes and collects it for you. Which is funny because most euro notes actually have cocaine on them—bankers, dealers, people throwing cash around clubs, rich people with nothing to do, all of them passing contaminated bills around. It’s just a fact of circulation.

So Moracchini made a machine that’s basically commentary on all of that. Money contaminated by what it buys. An ATM for desperation. The kind of art that works as both a joke and a genuine observation about how things actually work, all of it the same thing. He makes work like this a lot—stupid and smart at the same time, hitting you before you know what you’re even supposed to think.