The Art of Money

Today marks the opening of a new exhibition, “Money Talks,” at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum that considers the relationship of art to currency across centuries of design and cultural production. Culminating in a room dedicated to money as a medium, the show tracks the process by which, according to Max Haiven, “art is becoming more financialized and money is becoming more ‘cultural’”.

Displaying a remarkable array of exchange media as well as “money art” from around the world, the exhibition is a matrix of plural histories — running from Andy Warhol’s bombastic Dollar Sign (1981) through Meschac Gaba’s installation, Bank or Economy: Inflation (2016) that shows up Western currencies as enduring tools of imperial coercion, to Paula Stevens-Hoare’s portraits of Notable Women (2014) on British banknotes. 

The decision to devote the final section of the show to the “Age of Digital Ownership,” in collaboration with Dr. Foteini Valeonti and Jason Bailey, prompted inclusion of a number of canonical works of crypto art. Their juxtaposition alongside Joseph Beuys’s famous defaced currencies — whose monetary value increased due to the cultural value of his signature — signposts NFTs as a hybrid form of art-money. Here, Right Click Save hosts the museum’s curators Shailendra Bhandare and Agnes Valenčak alongside a number of participating artists in a conversation about money as a medium of cultural exchange.

‍RCS: How have you sought to narrate and present the relationship of art to currency through the exhibition? Are there any specific objects that feel especially resonant right now?‍

Shailendra Bhandare and Agnes Valenčak: One early section of the exhibition explores how King Edward VIII provided a steer on how coins struck in his name should look, wanting them to be “modern”. However, a later section of the exhibition shows how some artists make positive or negative statements on who was selected to be shown in the later 20th century or even more poignantly, in the format of a giant banknote, to show what defines “Britishness”. 

A work which resonates on a more international level is Stefan Wewerka’s screen print, Vive L’Europe (1990) that shows broken coins adjoined awkwardly following German reunification, or Stephen Sack’s Creatures of the Black Sea (2023) which is his statement against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.‍

RCS: The show considers the relationship of art to currency across centuries of design and cultural production. How does it feel to have your work included in that conversation? ‍

Larva Labs: It’s an interesting and odd feeling. It’s hard to assess the long-term importance of something when it’s so new. The CryptoPunks (2017) project is only seven years old, which is very short in art historical terms. However, even within these first few years, we’ve seen the project grow enormously, and have learned what it means to participants and enthusiasts. We feel like we are starting to see the long-term importance of what it represents. 

As a focus point for people’s feelings about digital permanence, value, and identity it does feel like [CryptoPunks] will stand the test of time as an important contribution.‍

Sarah Meyohas: It feels very fitting, as this relationship initially led me to create Bitchcoin (2015-21). I was thinking about gold, art, and alchemy, and specifically how gold has been used to convey value throughout art history, and how contemporary art has become a financial asset that is remarkably untethered to the cost of its material ingredients, and as such can be considered a form of alchemy.‍‍

‍Joe Looney (on behalf of Rare Pepe Wallet): Rare Pepes are a natural fit when discussing the evolution of money. They’ve demonstrated that one can create art using cryptocurrency as a canvas, and that art can then function as money itself. Art is money, money is art.‍

Ana María Caballero: This important exhibition places the relationship between art and money where it belongs: front and center. To separate the two is to subtract value from the labor of the artist, who lives in a world where currency is required to survive. 

‍Cultural institutions should follow the Ashmolean’s lead in removing all preciousness from discussions surrounding the monetization of art, a conversation that our project artifacts seeks to expand. What, and who, do we value as a society and why? This question applies to art, labor, human qualities, and cultural exchanges. artifacts asks all these questions at once. 

I’m thrilled to present artifacts — Ashmolean Edition, co-created with Alex Estorick, as part of this exhibition. Inspired by the museum’s own Oxford Crown, our site-specific artwork reimagining the iconic equestrian portrait of Charles as a figure in flux. The coin also includes carnations, worn by Oxford University’s students when taking their final exams. Our coin privileges education and knowledge as a new form of power, rather than the might of an inherited crown. ‍‍

‍RCS: New token economies have appeared with the rise of blockchain technology, which challenges the centralized control of money. What can we learn from token economies past and present and what makes them important to this exhibition?

SB & AV: One aspect that the exhibition covers with regard to fiduciary or token money is inflation — both as a monetary phenomenon and as a legacy of colonialism. 

Artists like Meschac Gaba have commented upon the “token worth” of themselves as artists through installations involving inflationary currencies, or John Murphy who makes interesting interventions with regard to what “value” is based on hyperinflation money using pictures and artworks by famous artists like Albrecht Dürer.‍‍

‍RCS: What are some of the problems you've encountered in curating an exhibition that spotlights many different histories of currency from around the world. How have you sought to address these problems in the show?‍

SB & AV: The greatest difficulty in developing an exhibition is the clarity of its narrative, but in this particular case, the great challenge is that the exhibits range from the relatively small, such as Roman coins, to works like Grayson Perry’s tapestry, Comfort Blanket (2014) or Tallur’s Unicode (2011) which are very large and heavy. We also have a great variety of media, from bronze, cast iron, and other metals to various works on paper, historic drawings, photographs, lenticular prints, traditional and less traditional paintings, not to mention textiles, including Susan Stockwell’s Money Dress (2010).

From a conceptual viewpoint, it was always going to be difficult to thread everything into a single narrative, so we decided to be clear about the divisions of topics through the galleries and provided “bridges” — both conceptual and visual — that fostered transition from one space to another with relatively less “friction”.‍‍

‍RCS: What prompted you to include a special section dedicated to the new age of digital ownership? In what ways does it augment and differ from what comes before it in the exhibition?‍

SB & AV: One of the important steers in this direction was to appreciate and show the engagement of digital artists with their “medium” rather than all the negative publicity crypto art gets for the volatility of the market. 

What makes artists opt into and operate within the digital realm? That is where we started. 

Digital artists fit into the show where we take a “futuristic” look at the way art and money come together. One of our targeted audience segments is “Young and Curious” and we hoped that there would be something in the show for them as well. Tokens that only exist in the virtual digital world will challenge our visitors and hopefully invite them to ask questions and to explore these new creative outputs for themselves.  While we are very conscious as a museum that only few people have access to these tokens, we hope that their inclusion will lower the wariness and make visitors curious to find out more.‍‍

‍RCS: What have you learned about the nature of digital ownership from your careers so far?

‍SM: Primarily, that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital ownership. The landscape already includes a wide variety of formats, from one-of-ones to generative projects, open editions, phygital work, tokenized performance pieces, and so on. 

The potential of digital ownership lies in its flexibility and expansiveness, far beyond merely imitating the collection of physical artwork. I believe we’ve only begun to explore this potential.

‍AMC: Since launching artifacts, digital ownership has expanded slowly but surely. This exhibition is proof of that. Indeed, the artifacts — Ashmolean Edition will become the first original NFT in the museum’s collection. Blockchain provenance is a revolutionary way of recording such ownership and creates a process that acknowledges the value and cultural relevance of digital assets.

‍JL: Digital ownership requires holders to be active participants. 

The natural laws that govern the physical world are well understood by holders of physical objects, but the laws that govern the digital world are still being formed and discovered within this new cryptocurrency and blockchain paradigm. 

‍LL: At the launch of CryptoPunks, we didn’t really know how “real” the ownership would feel. It checked all the right boxes to make digital ownership viable, but it was only after we launched it that we saw that it was working and, more importantly, felt that real ownership ourselves. Only by launching it and curating our own collections did it really gel for us. That’s why we continue to call it an “experiment” — it felt impossible to know in a vacuum if it would work until it was made real. We also started to see how important digital identity was becoming, especially during the pandemic. It made perfect sense that it could be more important to digitally native people to display their art in a social media setting than it would be to display it in their living rooms.