Todo tiene un precio (Everything Has a Price)

Victoria Gil, whose artistic practice was positioned in feminist currents from the start of her career to the end of the 1980s, participated in the public art proposal El artista y la ciudad with the intervention entitled Todo tiene un precio (Everything Has a Price), in which she set forth a critique of patriarchal society that targets how consumerism perpetuates gender roles and hides a strongly ideological publicity device.
This room displays some of the materials that were part of the street campaign: the same poster as those pasted around the streets publicising the main object of desire or consumption — a choker necklace exhibited on a suggestive red-velvet display stand. Alongside it in the display case are photographs of the action and different examples of simulated five-thousand-peseta notes without a legal tender value. In what was a commemorative year, 1992, official notes of that sum had been printed with the image of Christopher Columbus and the Catholic Kings, to which Gil responded with post-colonial and feminist irony, turning Columbus’s face into a woman’s. These bank notes were distributed around offices, banks and hairdressers, and had to be redeemed in the exhibition room for the prized gift-jewel.

Lola Hinojosa Martínez