Forget being worth their weight in goldwhat are the mundane objects of modern life really worth, as expressed in gold? Lisa Gralnicks show The Gold Standard, recently extended at BAM, tries to answer the question. Early in the 2000s, she began making white plaster replicas of various objectsvacuum cleaners, cell phones, bags of Starbucks coffee, handguns, light bulbs, etc.and then added to each replica an amount of gold equal in value to the object depicted. On the old $30 Hoover, its a Band-Aid-sized piece of gold repair tape affixed to the dust bag. And its the wire clasp sealing $90 worth of coffee. Gold makes up the faceplate on a Nokia cell phone carrying a $500 annual contract, while the Apple logo is gilt on a $2,000 desktop computer. (Her calculations dont include the trace amounts of gold contained inside our electronics.) Part of the point here is to consider how endlessly mutable gold is, how its been currency and commodity for millennia. Our vacuums and cell phones wont hold up so well. And the price of gold has risen since the economys tanked, making Gralnicks work more valuable, and topical, than when it was created. BRIAN MILLER
Mondays-Thursdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays, 12-5 p.m. Starts: March 18. Continues through Aug. 15, 2010
