September 24, 2008

The police and the artwork

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 8:32 am

When guerrilla art becomes official, we need to look to officials for guerrilla art.

Some 250,000 coloured euro cents, weighing 670 kilos, and worth 2,500 euro formed the minted graffiti of Stefan Sagmeister as part of Experimenta Design 2008 in Amsterdam. According to the artist:

After the piece is completely set up we will leave it alone, on the street. We expect the piece to slowly dissolve as people take coins, play with them, alter the design.

This happened sooner than expected. Not everybody was in on the artist’s idea of slow disintegration, and when a neighbour saw somebody with a large bag sampling the artwork, they called the police. The police tried and failed to contact the owner, and then decided to help out further by, er, interacting with the artwork themselves, cleaning the entire square. Somehow the artist, who got his coins back in what can only be described as body bags for art works, hadn’t seen that one coming.

Volunteers had worked for 8 days to spell out the text “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better” in painted cents.

“Vandalism or street art?” asks Bright about the piece. “Police destroys art work,” headlines Francisco van Jole. “Money the police sure can use,” muses Trendbeheer. Anyway, still plenty photos and even videos exist. Amongst them this rather artful one by Anjens, some rights reserved and titled CSI Amsterdam.

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June 19, 2007

How to make money – a government primer

Filed under: Automobiles,General by Orangemaster @ 12:23 pm
permit1.jpg

First passports, now driving licences.

The differences in price for a new driving licence are huge, according to a survey done by the Dutch ANWB automobile association. Prices ranges from EUR 21,90 to EUR 60. About 100 municipalities out of 443 were randomly selected. The ANWB finds these differences way too big and will try and remedy the situation by bugging the transport minister about it.

Some things to know:
– Smaller towns are cheaper than bigger ones
– From the five bigger Dutch cities, Eindhoven is the cheapest at EUR 30, while Amsterdam is EUR 49.
– And surprise, surprise, the prices on websites are not the same as the ones you actually pay.

(Link: zibb)

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May 2, 2007

Internet payments: iDeal has gotten more popular in 2006

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:55 pm

creditcard.jpgThe Dutch never really warmed to the idea of the credit card, and generally consider it unsafe for online transactions. The new kid on the block, the iDeal system, is rapidly gaining ground, according to the organisation controlling several popular payment methods for the major Dutch banks, Currence, who also run the iDeal system (press release in Dutch). It works like this: at the check-out of an online store, a customer clicks on the iDeal logo, and gets the electronic banking interface of their own bank. In this interface, the required sum is transfered immediately to the shop keeper.

iDeal has shot up from being used for 1% of all online payments in its first year, 2005, to 15% in 2006. Paying by credit card has dropped in popularity from 19% to 13%. Of all Dutch online shoppers, 73% consider iDeal to be a safe system, whereas only 32% think the same of credit cards.

According to ZDnet (Dutch), using acceptgiros (deposit transfer cards) and a bank’s online banking system directly are the most popular forms of payment.

(Image source: Lotus Head.)

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