Greed, Art, and Conflict Minerals
I spent the last month of the year in bed. It was primarily bad luck — I don’t get sick often but managed on this occasion to catch both Covid and a cold within the span of some three weeks. I always do the same thing when I’m ill. Too tired to read and too anxious to relax completely, I fill up my browser history with documentaries on corruption, drug abuse, and criminality.
I’m not sure why. To feel worse? Or better? To remind myself of the horrid state of the world in order to find myself even more apathetic than before? Or gain some valuable perspective and stop pitying myself?
Here is a trivia for you (perhaps you knew it all along). The smartphone or computer on which you are currently reading this text on is dependent upon a chemical element called cobalt. It is a component of rechargeable batteries and exists in virtually all computers, smartphones — and more than anything — electric vehicles.
Most cobalt (around 70%) is found in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the majority of which, in turn, is owned by Chinese corporations (around 80%). Many of the Congolese workers in these mines work in near–medieval conditions: they are exploited, underpaid, and abused — many of them bringing home no more than 2 dollars per day in mines that regularly collapse, suffocating its inhabitants to death. [1]
(I am sitting on a park bench in Zurich right now, writing this text in my notebook. Upon leaving my apartment this morning I realised I had forgotten to bring a pen. I stopped by the supermarket and bought a three–pack for 4 dollars.)
Do we need new smartphones once a year? Do we need gadgets for our every trivial need? And besides, why is everything so cheap anyway?
Perhaps a new smartphone shouldn’t cost two hundred collars. Perhaps it should cost two thousand if that is what it takes to get the children out of the mines, to give the men shoes to wear, the pregnant women face masks, and the tunnels scaffolding so they don’t collapse and bury its workers alive.
Not to mention the cars. To produce a smartphone you need around 8 grams of cobalt. To produce a battery–driven electric car: up to 15 kilograms. And yet we are so proud, here in the West, of our new green revolution: of our Teslas, our beautiful cities at last free of its dirty pollution. Indeed, we have come a long way since smog–covered London (my grandparents were there, they used to tell me stories) — the New Utopia is green, fresh, electric, unpolluted, renewable, rechargeable. At last we found it — the Solution! The problem is not the fact that we consume too much. No, it is that we have done it wrong all along. Let us keep consuming, let us not do the hard work of changing our ways. Instead, let us put a green patch on top of our problems (hiding whatever lies behind) and pretend we have it figured out… [2]
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. [3]
Perhaps the root of all evil really is just greed. Greed — the “uncontrolled longing for increase in material gain…or social value, such as status, or power”. Greed for power, status, money, objects, or whatever it may be. Be it the urge to dictate a nation, or the urge to purchase yet another sweater when you already own a dozen. The scope may differ. But the motivation is the same.
I have revisited art history lately — especially the early 1900s. When the conveyor belt really took off and we began to view goods not as luxury but necessity. The art world (like all other worlds) glorified it: finally an –ism to save the world! Paintings became filled with (and composed of) things, goods, displayed like relics behind thick glass. If anything can be art, let us make it the object (that Madonna of the future!). But Andy Warhol was not just a pop art–pioneer, challenging our newfound obsessions with consumerism and advertising. He was also a pathological hoarder.
If art still holds the possibility to arouse revolutions, let it be one of the anti–object. Where lifeless items are replaced by emotion, clutter by intention, and mindless noise by contemplation. Less is more, perhaps. But only when replaced by purpose. Maybe our human inclination towards greed cannot be fought. Fine, then let us re–direct it: towards knowledge, friendship, experience, and love.
Here is something else that we should not forget. The work of art is not — as we have alluded to — an object. It is not an ornament or a commodity. Art is the way we live, the way that we conduct ourselves, the choices that we make, and the manner in which we shape our lives. Indeed, objects can be conduits for such ideas: they may teach us and remind us of them. But they are not the idea itself. That exists within its spectator.
If you give yourself but one rule this year — in art and life — let it be this: act solely with intention. Choose the arena in which you express your (human, all too human) greed. And when given the choice, favour silence — emptiness — over mindless noise devoid of a true meaning.
Happy New Year.
Maja Malmcrona
9 January 2023
Maja Malmcrona is an artist from Sweden based in Zurich, Switzerland. She works primarily in drawing, painting, and sculpture.
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[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/339834/mine-production-of-cobalt-in-dr-congo/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/costs-nickel-cobalt-used-electric-vehicle-batteries-2022-02-03/
[3] Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899.
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandraaseno/2016/02/08/was-andy-warhol-a-hoarder/
