Yukinori Yanagi wants to show you what ants think about money.

Nothing. They are ants. They do not think even a little bit about money. They don’t care at all that if they put these pieces together they could buy something like 4 gumballs, which would keep their chompers busy for years.

A fellow artist explained that, “An ant doesn’t comprehend.” What’s a dollar to an ant? Nada. All an ant knows is food, farm, and fam. Dollar Pyramid is exhibited alongside a video display of the ants doing their thing, so you can actually watch them comprehend nothing. Which is honestly inspirational, can you imagine a life of only good-work thoughts?

Originally the installation was more like a performance piece that included 1600 ants. Once they were done with their burrowing, Yukinori adhered the sand to protect the tunnels. Now the ants’ opinions are permanently recorded, like an anti-dollar manifesto that only hangs in museums. Yukinori learned his lesson after being court-ordered by Italy to not unnecessarily harm ants (what is this, a court for ants?) at the Venice Bienniale, and released the surviving ants at the end of the exhibition so that they could go off to dig more tunnels and steal pie from picnics or whatever ants do.

While the ant here is kind of like the paint brush, it is also the artist. I mean, this is kind of like “Occupy Dollar,” they destroyed this money like it was nothing, which anarchists have been trying to do since the 1800s with no luck. Of course, destroying the money helped the ants eat, which is the opposite of what it does for anarchists.

This is a companion piece to a similar series Yukinori did with ants and patterns of national flags. The idea in these works is dissolution—the ants aren’t just chomping a dollar, they’re getting putting a hole right in capitalist society.