Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles. Section Financière

What you see before you is another section of Museum of Modern Art, which has become, since Broodthaers' time, practically the most important section of any museum, the section that ensures its stable existence.

Originally, this section was represented by a dust jacket (you can see it in a display window in Skylight Gallery) that contained nineteen copies of Cologne art market catalogue, each dedicated to one artist or writer. On the cover, Broodthaers wrote, "Museum of Modern Art for sale due to insolvency." The same information was repeated on the inside, with contact details of Galerie Michael Werner for potential buyers in the German version. At the booth of the gallery during the art market, visitors could see a gold bar stamped with an eagle, which you can see in the display case. What kind of currency is this? Is this the measure of a museum’s value? Or is this what can save a museum from bankruptcy? Is this the hard currency that all museum activities are converted to, while symbolic value remains ephemeral?