How Not to Make Content

The weather in New York has been confounding lately, neither lion nor lamb, but some fantastical hybrid, a sphinx or Chimera, each day somehow built from the business-minded body parts of each season. However I dress for outside gets proven wrong, as the lion’s head of early spring morning becomes the dragon wings of fall before I can make it home.

Q and I found ourselves walking through the snake tail of winter late into March as we headed to the Whitney Museum. We weren’t going for the exhibitions, however. Back in December, we read about a vending machine in Grand Central’s seasonal Holiday Market that gave a tiny random print in exchange for four quarters. This machine is the brainchild of Ana Inciardi, a graphic artist from Brooklyn who specializes in cute linocut prints mainly of food. She says she came up with the idea in 2020 during the pandemic while collecting quarters for laundry, and she also fondly remembered temporary tattoo machines from growing up in New York. Now she’s placed about 50 pedestal print vending machines in stores, restaurants, and museums across the U.S.

The Grand Central Holiday Market cycled out for another season before we could get there, but we discovered that machines were still exchanging quarters for prints throughout the city, including at the Whitney. New York slice shops and bodegas still love cash, and Q and I had already accumulated a…