Currency

Common Currency

Art and money

In the spring of 1994, feeling conflicted over the choice between making art or making money, I found myself compelled to pursue a new project - making art out of money. Faced with mounting money problems, making art out of money as a way to make money from my art was an act of rebellion. I often find myself frustrated, depressed and overwhelmed by the problem of money. I feel very strong about the need to make art but I am not good with money and have spent decades trying to make art that is consistent with what I know to be true but which will also sell. This project seemed to underscore, and give me permission to write about, some of the problems artists face with regard to what is essentially a values conflict. How do we, as individuals and a country, value arts and culture in relationship to money and all the other things money can buy. About three weeks ago I was displaying my work at an art fair where I had on display a large beautiful picture that took about three months to make. If it had sold then for those three months I would have earned the equivalent of the federal poverty level for three months. It did not sell. At one point during the fair an older man looked at the price tag and walked away saying "its only money." Actually it is more than that. Art is not money, nor is it entertainment or decoration. It is beauty, it is conscousness, it is an intellectual and emotional experience that yields to deep looking and like any good work of art will deepen over the life of the owner and his or her decendents, potentially for generations. Some of the best minds in evey historical period have been devoted to making art. Art, unlike any mass produced and advertised product from cars to appliances will retain its value and quality when used as intended. It is in a completly different category of value from money and the other things money can buy.

Like most artists I want to create things which are interesting, important, meaningful and valued but I also want to create work that sells. Ours in a culture that values people by their incomes rather than their creativity. Decades after quitting my day job, I find myself in debt with an enormous portfolio of drawings, paintings and sculptures which I know are valuable but which I've not been any good at selling. For every gallery exhibit or art fair I have ever been involved with I've worked hard and with high hopes only to end up dissapointed by the small number of sales. As a result I have gone long periods during which I have not shown my work as well periods when I've gone back to school to study art while filling sketchbooks on the side. I don't think my experience is very unique. The number of artists that can't make a living off their work and must instead rely on part time jobs or parents or inheritance or the earnings of a spouse must far outnumber those who can even come close to earning a povery level income from their work (a little over $1000 per month).

It is the distinction between the deeper value of my art and its cash value and my inablity to establish a reliable exchange rate between the two that causes me the most trouble. I don't need to be rich, I just want to be able to pay my own way making something enriching. Living a reclusive life where I can garden, raise fish and ducks and make art in a house and studio I built myself feeds my art. To become an extrovert and move to one of our regional or national art capitals in order to increase my work's cash value, would be to me a sign of failure rather than success.

My principle concern is with deeply human values and experiences and the ability of art to connect with those values, to enrich life and leave one richer as a result. It can be hard to explain, much less establish the value of such experiences. To argue that art is not as valuable as other things is a false dichotomy. The choice is not between art and food or art and housing but between a life of greater or lesser meaning and beauty.

When I decided to paint on currency, I also found myself looking at its inherent aesthetic qualities. Like most people I have handled currency for years without really looking at it. Now, by using acrylic paints to block out some elements and highlight others or overlay the whole with elements of my own, I have become aware of how really well designed they actually are. They contain a well-proportioned classical beauty that make a wonderful point of departure. The backs of one dollar bills are particularly interesting. I have long known that they are steeped in Masonic symbolism, but until recently I had never taken a compass and ruler to one to try to uncover the extent to which geometry has been used to proportion the note.

Bills are also painted on a paper that has a durability and dimensional stability uncommon among even the finest art papers. This paper has a distinct tactile quality that remains in the finished painted dollar–at least when left unframed. We all know the feel of money from years of association with it. When holding painted money all those associations, our desires and frustrations, rise to the surface. It is real money. I may have succeeded in attaching additional value to it but it still retains retains an original value communicated by tactile qualities as well as by visual ones.

Is it legal?

Painting on currency raises some questions beyond aesthetics and the meaning of value. Many people who have seen my painted dollars to either ask me, "Is this legal?" or tell me outright, "This is illegal." One person insisted that it was defacing the great seal that would get me into trouble. Perhaps a secret order of illuminati thugs are going to inforce that one. While I have not researched case law regarding the defacement of currency, I do believe I am within my rights. When the supreme court ruled that flag burning was a form of political speech protected by the first amendment, it became safe to assume that no national symbols are, as symbols, protected from defacing.

Perhaps currency is a special case because I don't actually own the dollar, I own the value of the dollar and the bill simply carries that value like a gift card. Unlike a flag, a paper dollar or coin carries tangible value in a country so materialistic that many people seem to believe that America was not just created as a democracy but specificly a capitalist democracy as if capitalism itself is inshrined in the consitution. We certainly don't want to shake people's faith in the capitalism by defacing a dollar. But what constitutes destruction of value or meaningful defacement? Bills are regularly worn out, torn, stained, stapled, washed and dried, doodled upon and written on in the course of their natural lives. None of this affects a bill's value. There is even a department within the Treasury whose sole job it is to reconstruct the value of currency damaged as a result of everything from fire to being buried in a tin can for years. The remains are painstakingly analyzed and if a sufficient residual amount remains its value will be resurected and replaced with new bills.

Perhaps we should be concerned with questions of intent. I can think of many more cases of defacement in the name of art than just my painted bills. One can occasionally find coins which have been fashioned into jewelry at art and craft fairs. I myself wore a silver dollar given to me by my grandfather when I was a boy in a belt buckle for over twenty years. In all that time only one person has criticized me, pointing out that the coin's numismatic value was being eroded. This individual was under the curious impression that the coin would be of more value to me as a momento of my grandfather if I had put it away out of sight in a box for those twenty years.

Destroying a coin or federal reserve note's numismatic value is not the same as destroying a thing's value in the market place. When a jeweler cuts dimes into little open work portraits of Liberty or Eisenhower for a pair of earrings, their fungibility might be destroyed but their value is increased. I have been told by a jeweler that it is value adding, as opposed to simple value destruction, which makes such jewelry legal.

But how do we decide when value has been added or destroyed? I have a two nickels I shot with a .22 caliber rifle as a boy. They are no longer fungible and have no value as jewelry, but I have personally valued them as momentos of my childhood more than ordinary nickels for a very long time. For me these nickels, like my belt buckle, have a certain talismanic value. These nickels were shot back when guns and their power was new to me. If I were to go out tomorrow and shoot nickels again, it wouldn't be the same. There are qualities or values that depends on the experiencial reality of the thing - a certain essentialism. If created with a genuine sense of inquiry or need for artistic expression, then my humblest doodles will possess more of this quality, more intrinsic value, than the most masterful forgeries or the best mechanical reproductions of the most famous paintings in the world.

As an artist being true to myself and my work, am I even capable of destroying value? Recently I took a dollar bill, soaked it in bleach, splattered it with paint and punched it with a thousand jagged little holes. Is it now worth more or less than a dollar? I took another and wrapped it around a bottle rocket, secured it with string, lit the fuse, dropped it into a coffee can on my studio floor and slapped on the lid. Ignition blew off the lid and as it screached, spinning round the bottom of the can, far louder than I had imagined, ending in an even louder bang, I found myself laughing uncontroably at my own recklessness and shock at the event I had set in motion. I still have the fragments of the rocket and the dollar and while "worthless" their ablity to trigger my memory of the event makes those fragments priceless, at least to me.

If I set fire to a dollar and then save, display and sell those ashes, has value been created or destroyed? These works are not about decorations or visual aesthetics, but take on value from being part of my inquiry into the nature of value. If after reading this, someone else does the same thing to a dollar without the same level of involvement, does it have the same value? It might sell for more–particularly if they are better at self-promotion and marketing than I, but it won't have the same reality. A lot hinges on the reality of an artist's effort or inquiry. It can take non artists some time to figure this out but just because they, or their kid, can make a work of art that is similar to what an avant guard artist made 50 or 100 years ago it will not have the same value. They would simply not have thought of working on the same project and it is the idea, and the timing and context of the idea that creates value, not facsimile. Within the context of my current work, if I throw the ashes of a burnt dollar to the wind, there will still remain some conceptual value that is worth more than a dollar and I would be happy to sell you a certificate of authenticity that I am selling you part of the conceptual value of that event. I am not normally a conceptual artist but would be happy to call myself one to for any collector of conceptual art interested in sharing in the concept. The fact that I am thinking of this in the context of my inquiry lends some credibily to my asking for more than a dollar for that certificate. Anyone copying the idea after reading this would not only lack the essential reality of the original idea but but subject to a law suit, which in our society might be far more lucrative than trying to sell shares of the concept.

Now if the Federal Reserve decides to increase or decrease the money supply, the resulting inflation or deflation would do more to create or destroy the actual value of untold trillions of federal reserve notes than anything I, acting as an individual conceptual artist, could ever do.

Bringing up the Federal Reserve brings up another more tangible question of value. If I take my dollars to the Federal Reserve bank they agree to pay exactly absolutely nothing except maybe another note. They may replace a damaged note with a new one, but they have nothing of value - no gold or silver, no cheeseburger or fries - with which to back it up. Despite what it says, a Federal Reserve note is not legal tender as originally defined by the constitution. The important thing to most people is not what the Federal Reserve will offer for a note but what their local shop keepers will offer. I personally don't think this is nearly as big an issue as the fact that bankers now run the agencies responcible for regulating them and are not only too big to fail but too powerful to prosecute for criminal behaviour.

The fact that I am painting on Federal Reserve notes and not gold or silver backed dollars does put a small twist in my thinking. While a note is in my possession, do I own it outright or do I only own the value represented by it? Between receiving it as change at one store and spending it at another, was it ever really mine or was it simply a value marker, like a poker chip, borrowed from the Federal Reserve casino? If I sell a painted dollar, does the collector own the note or only the paint and the value represented by the note? Is the note subject to repossession?

The question of ownership may be central to what I am allowed to do with notes while they are in my possession. If I start writing messages on them and then re-circulate them, would this constitute graffiti on a public edifice? I have seen bills stamped with "where's george?" inviting people to visit a website and track there the bill has been, for a price. What if I get a rubber stamp that reads, "Buy art. It is worth more than this," and then I stamp it on the back of every note that passes through my hands for the next twenty years. Would I be a criminal? I've no more altered the notes fungibility than do bank tellers that put numbers on the top note of a stack of bills to keep track of them. What if Pepsi began printing their logos on the backs of one dollar bills with the words, "Good for one 16 ounce Pepsi at participating retailers." If it is ruled such advertising is illegal, perhaps I could get Pepsi in trouble by printing their logo for them. I imagine all sorts of people and corporations could stamp all manner of messages on dollar bills.

Conclusion

The very fact that I have to consider the legality of defacing or painting on money says a lot about the status or value we place on money. It is largely a distraction and peripheral to what I really want to deal with on this project. I am tired of being poor but I still believe that if I keep working, refining my vision and improving my skills I will someday reach a break through point and my work will start selling. I have told myself for years, for decades now, that my growing portfolio of drawings and paintings is my investment portfolio. People are often mystified at the astronmical prices the art world can place on the work of some living artists. Although some artists know how to work the system for money for most artists the transition from starving emerging artist to established affuent artist can happen quickly and be something they are unprepared for. I have told people half jokingly that the secret to become a successful artist is not dying. If one continues to develop as an artist, if one contines to value what one is doing in the face of a market that does not, the pendulum will swing. Not all of of us will live to see it but then money is not the goal anyway. For most artists the goal is just to be able to keep working with a certain amount of self respect because arts true value will always be greater than what anyone (or any other occupation) will pay.

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