''Wir kaufen Seelen'' (also known as Seelenankauf or Soul Sale) is a 1998

performance A performance is an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Management science In the work place ...

by Austrian art theory group monochrom and is considered a significant work in the group's history and Austrian art history in the 1990s. On 1 November 1998 ( All Souls' Day), monochrom members

Johannes Grenzfurthner Johannes Grenzfurthner (; born 1975 in Vienna) is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of ''monochrom'', an international art ...

and Harald Homolka-List (supported by their friend Ulrich Troyer) staged a "spirituo-capitalist booth" at Stock-im-Eisen-Platz (very close to St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna's first district) where the project members tried to buy the

soul In many religious and philosophical traditions, there is a belief that a soul is "the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being". Etymology The Modern English noun ''soul'' is derived from Old English ''sāwol, sāwel''. The earliest attes ...

s of passers-by for

ATS ATS or Ats may refer to: Businesses * ATS Wheels, or ''Auto Technisches Spezialzubehör'', a German wheel manufacturer and sponsor of a Formula One racing team * ATS Automation Tooling Systems, an Ontario, Canada-based factory automation company ...

50 (roughly US$5) per soul. The "acquisition team" performed an "evaluation routine" to check the "quality" of the soul of interested sellers, for example by asking jargon-laden philosophical questions, by using a

divining rod Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia),As translated from one preface of the Kassel experiments, "roughly 10,000 active dowsers in Ge ...

and similar

pseudoscientific Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claim ...

techniques. A total of fifteen were purchased and registered. These souls are still being offered for sale to third parties. The group sees the project - beyond all philosophical discourses and argumentation seeking to prove the existence of God or an

afterlife The afterlife (also referred to as life after death) is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's identity or their stream of consciousness continues to live after the death of their physical body. The surviving ess ...

- in the classical sense of a market driven by

supply and demand In microeconomics, supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a Market (economics), market. It postulates that, Ceteris paribus, holding all else equal, in a perfect competition, competitive market, the unit price for a ...

. For the group it "doesn't actually matter if there is a soul, as long as it can be sold for a profit. The soul is a tradable commodity, a form of virtual capital." The performance has been presented in exhibitions and debated in magazines and in academic circles.

External links

Wir kaufen Seelen
(project page)

References

{{performance art Performances 1998 works 1998 in art Monochrom