“Our whorer of a King”. That was imprinted on coins that emerged around Sweden in the summer of 2012. This prank obviously played on widely spread rumors about the Swedish kings meetings with ‘coffee girls’ during private dinners with the Swedish (male) elites. The false coins impressed experts and left the media baffled. “The Royal Coin” became a prattle in mass media and social media during the summer news dry of 2012. Who was behind this?  And, most important: what was The message? These false coins did not seem to be part of an ordinary counterfeit; rather it seemed to be some sort of anti royal statement. Soon speculations about its begetter turned towards the art world. The man behind this performance came forward in a press conference held during an avantgarde art fair in Stockholm in September 2012. It turned out that the architect behind this intriguing set up came from the PR-sector, and he stated that it could not reasonably be his responsibility to declare ‘the meaning of this piece, being, as he said, an ’amateur artist’. The press conference gathered hordes of journalists, but they did not get their main question answered (What was your aim/What was your purpose?). After a while the instigator fled his own press conference, leaving the journalist astound. The media system was short circuited, and what was to follow was the media systems ultimate punishment: Silence.

In this paper I will discuss ‘The Royal Coin’ as a performance, with reference to previous works of artists who have used ‘The media’ and its logics as a studio and stage (think Warhol) for their artistic work. In my discussion I use concepts taken from Jean Baudrillard, such as non event and objective irony, to pinpoint this (among others) strategy for avant gard(ish) techniques as a form of media criticism in a non escapable hyper reality.