Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

Mosaics in the atrium of the Pest Commercial Bank with the

ALLEGORIES OF COMMERCE (MERCURY). FINANCE, INDUSTRY AND

Agriculture

those fine achievements of social welfare. In such an establishment patrons could quickly and cheaply fill their empty stomachs standing up, like cars at a petrol station where the only measure is the number of litres. The experience of daily life confirmed that perfect social equality had been achieved in eating, which was no more than a phase of metabolism in a fast paced series of events. Today the spread of expensive American fast food chains is metamorphosing a formerly profane form of quick nourishment into a status symbol and thus self-service restaurants have become the unwelcome and not even profitable terrain of social inequality, while street-corners are becoming dominated by the most up-to-date centres of information transfer and social change-banks.

It might be too much to claim that this transformation, whose result is that personal interactions have been replaced by transactions on the foreign-currency

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