The Shareholder and The Jackal: an artist’s fables

Michael Stevenson, together with frieze contributing editor Jan Verwoert, has written a small series of nine short, at times hilarious, Aesopian fables, published in connection to the artist’s project ‘Lender of the Last Resort’ at the Kröller-Müller-Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands. The Kröller-Müller is a beautiful sculpture garden museum in the middle of a park forest, an interestingly odd place seemingly removed as far as possible from the world of finance. Its foundation by the Kröller-Müller family however does have a connection to finance; and Stevenson, with an historian’s curiosity, looked into it. Instead of coming up with charts and stern message panels, however, he and Verwoert wrote short parables such as that of the ‘The Lizard and The Eagle’, or ‘The Shareholder and the Jackal’ (‘At the annual banquet held in honour of the bull, the shareholder came to sit next to the jackal at the dinner table…’). My favourite story is that of ‘The Ant and the Reclining Beauty’. If I may quote more extensively, it begins:

After a hard days work, an ant set out on his long way home, spent and tired, when he came upon a clearing where a figure was reclining on a podium. ‘Life is unjust!’ the ant cried furiously at the figure. ‘I work so hard and all you do is lie out and enjoy the surroundings. And at the end of the day you never have to worry about getting home because you never move at all!’

To cut a short story even shorter, the ant and the reclining beauty agree to swap places, leaving the reclining beauty however unhappy with the ant’s continuing, busy restlessness on the podium.

Watching the scene from above, Jove held his belly laughing and exclaimed: ‘Hard labour will never procure what elegance yields without effort. But rarely do the idle live in peace with themselves because they know not how blessed they are.’