Art & Money: A Foundational Enquiry

Originally developed and taught at the School of Creative Media in Hong Kong as GE1127 in 2014 and 2015 by David Jhave Johnston. The following synthesis was written by GPT-4.5 (in conjunction with Jhave) in July 2025 based on the 2014 slides which are available here as pdfs.

Section 1: The Shared Abstractions of Art and Money

This is not a course about the art market, nor is it a manual for financial management. It is an inquiry into the foundational, often invisible, structures that link two of humanity's most potent symbolic systems: art and money. At their core, both are forms of cultural inscription, their value derived not from intrinsic utility but from a shared, and often unspoken, social consensus. They are, in essence, theatres of belief.

The exploration begins with a series of shared conceptual frameworks that reveal the deep-seated interdependence of economic exchange and cultural expression.

Shared Transcendence: Money, divorced from its material use-value, operates as a form of concealed transcendence, a quantitative abstraction that allows for the exchange of all things. Art, in its pursuit of the aesthetic, the conceptual, and the sublime, offers a qualitative form of transcendence. They share an implicit purpose: to move beyond the purely functional.

Shared Relational Concerns: Contemporary art often investigates the quality of social relations, while money serves to quantify them. They are two sides of the same coin, one exploring the nuances of human connection, the other providing the universal metric for its exchange.

Shared Symbolic Nature: A banknote is a piece of paper whose representative value far exceeds its material worth. An artwork is a collection of materials whose cultural value is similarly symbolic. Both are structures of representation, reliant on a collective agreement to sustain their meaning.

Shared Reliance on Consensus: Without a group of people who agree on their value, both art and money are worthless. They emerge from context and are sustained by trust.

Shared Material Evolution: The history of art and the history of money follow parallel technological trajectories. The same innovations that allowed for new forms of currency---carving, smelting, printing, programming---also enabled new forms of artistic expression. Their material evolutions are intertwined.

This inquiry is particularly urgent in the digital age, a moment when the physical forms of both art and money are on the threshold of obsolescence. As trading is enacted through flash algorithms and art becomes data-driven, the very nature of value, exchange, and culture is being redefined.

Section 2: Primordial Exchange and the Origins of Value

To understand money, one must look past the economist's tidy narrative of barter leading to currency and instead turn to an anthropological history rooted in social obligation and symbolic representation. The origins of value are not found in a simple "coincidence of wants," but in the complex webs of debt, ritual, and memory that bind societies together.

The earliest forms of accounting were not for trade, but for keeping records. The 22,000-year-old Ishango bone, with its logical carvings, is a primordial tally stick, a tool for memory and measure. This concept of the tally is fundamental. The Greek word symbolon, from which our word "symbol" derives, originally meant a tally---an object broken in half to record a debt or agreement. The contemporary Chinese word fu has an almost identical origin, referring to the two halves of a tally that, when joined, prove an agreement or fulfill a promise. Money, therefore, does not begin as a thing, but as a relationship---a record of a promise or a debt.

Before the invention of coinage, value was embodied in a vast array of objects, each with its own story and social context. These were not abstract units of account but items deeply embedded in cultural practice: sperm whale teeth in Fiji, wampum beads in Indigenous North America, and the massive Rai stones of Yap, whose value was tied to their size and history. In ancient Sumer, the word for interest, mas, was also the word for "lamb," a direct link between agricultural cycles and the concept of economic return. Even in the 20th century, commodities could become currency out of necessity, as when Kent cigarettes were used for payments and bribes in Romania between 1970 and 1990.

This history reveals that "money is just a story," an imagined relationship between an object and its perceived worth. This narrative quality is precisely where it intersects with art. The artist Vik Muniz, working with the garbage pickers of Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill, created portraits from the very trash the subjects collected. His work Marat-Sebastiao (2008), a recreation of Jacques-Louis David's masterpiece from refuse, powerfully illustrates this principle: by changing the form and context of matter, value itself is transformed.

Section 3: The Axial Age: The Invention of Coins, Philosophy, and Armies

The invention of coinage was not an isolated economic event but a part of a profound global transformation that the philosopher Karl Jaspers termed the "Axial Age" (c. 800 BC--600 AD). This period witnessed the near-simultaneous emergence of the world's major philosophical and religious systems---from Pythagoreanism in Greece and Buddhism in India to Confucianism and Taoism in China---and the rise of a new form of organized violence: the professional army.

The three regions where coinage first appeared---the Aegean, the Ganges valley, and the Yellow River valley---were the epicenters of this intellectual and military revolution. The development of the Greek phalanx, a military formation that required trained, professional hoplite soldiers, created a logistical problem: how to pay them. Small, standardized, portable units of precious metal---coins---were an obvious solution. Indeed, one theory holds that the first Lydian coins were minted explicitly to pay mercenaries.

This created what has been termed a "military-coinage-slavery complex". Wars of conquest required professional armies, which needed to be paid in coin. The conquest of territory, particularly mines, provided the raw materials (gold, silver, copper) to produce more coins, while the enslavement of conquered populations provided the labor to work those mines. Alexander the Great's army, numbering some 120,000 men, required half a ton of silver per day for wages alone. As the ancient Indian text, the Arthashastra, states: "The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole wide earth".

This new material reality of money coincided with a new, more abstract way of thinking about the world. The first Greek philosophers---Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes---all lived in Miletus, the great commercial hub of Ionia and the first Greek city to strike its own coins. The emergence of a universal medium of exchange seems to have enabled a search for a universal substance or principle (arche) underlying all of reality.

This period also saw a revolution in art. The Archaic age of Greek sculpture, with its stylized kouroi, gave way to the astonishing realism of the Classical age. This transition, a shattering of tradition in favor of humanism and experimentation, occurred precisely as coinage became widespread. A parallel can be drawn: just as individual artists discovered figurative realism, which was then adopted by the state for monuments, coinage was invented by private citizens but quickly monopolized by states to fund their armies and project their power.

Section 4: The Artist as Alchemist: Manipulating Currency

If money is a system of representation based on trust, then artists who manipulate currency are uniquely positioned to interrogate its foundations. By forging, faking, altering, or re-contextualizing money, they expose the fragility of the consensus that gives it value and question the authority of the state that issues it.

The practice has a rich history. In the early 20th century, the trompe l'oeil painter and engineer Otis Kaye created hyper-realistic paintings of banknotes, such as Money to Burn (1910), which he gave away because painting currency was illegal. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp paid his dentist with a meticulously hand-drawn Tzanck Cheque, a gesture that playfully subverted the very notion of payment.

The most sustained investigation into this territory was conducted by J.S.G. Boggs. Beginning in the 1980s, Boggs would hand-draw a variation of a banknote and attempt to "spend" it at face value for goods and services. For Boggs, the artwork was not the drawing itself, but the entire transaction: the drawing, the receipt, the change, and the story of the exchange. This performance forced his counterparts—waiters, shopkeepers, ticket agents—into a moment of profound vertigo, forcing them to ask: "What is art? What is money? What is worth worth?". Boggs's work led to his arrest by the Bank of England, but he maintained that he was not a counterfeiter; he was an artist exploring the nature of value.

Other artists have used currency as a raw material. Mark Wagner's intricate collages, assembled from dissected one-dollar bills, transform the most ubiquitous piece of paper in America into something bizarre and beautiful. Scott Campbell uses a laser to cut elaborate, three-dimensional skulls into stacks of uncut currency sheets sourced from the U.S. Mint, as in his Pièce de Résistance (2011), an act of creative destruction that evokes the impermanence of wealth.

The act of currency manipulation can also be a direct political statement. In the 1960s, the Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa was indicted for reproducing 1,000-yen notes for an exhibition announcement. In response, he created the Greater Japan Zero-yen Note (1967), explicitly stating its lack of monetary value and inviting people to exchange real yen for it, a conceptual attempt to remove state-issued money from circulation. More recently, the Occupy George project stamped dollar bills with infographics illustrating wealth disparity in the U.S., turning currency into a medium for viral protest. These artistic interventions reveal that the power of money lies not in the paper itself, but in the symbols and authority it represents—an authority that is always open to being questioned, subverted, and reimagined.

Section 5: Branding the Priceless: Dealers, Spectacle, and the Art-Ad Complex

In the contemporary art world, value is not simply discovered; it is constructed. This construction is a process of "branding," where an artist's name becomes a luxury trademark, and their work is sold not just as an aesthetic object but as a signifier of social status. This system is managed by a network of powerful dealers who function as brand managers for their artists.

The history of the branded art dealer can be traced to figures like Joseph Henry Duveen, who famously declared, "When you pay high for the priceless, you acquire it cheaply." Duveen sold not just art, but social status, to the new American robber barons. In the post-war era, Leo Castelli professionalized the role, paying his artists a stipend and creating a market for Pop Art. When Willem de Kooning quipped that Castelli "could give him two beer cans and he could sell them," Jasper Johns created Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale) (1960), a sculpture of two beer cans, which Castelli promptly sold.

Today, mega-dealers like Larry Gagosian have perfected this model, pre-selling entire shows over the phone to clients who may purchase a work sight-unseen, trusting the Gagosian brand to guarantee its value. This system creates a feedback loop: gallery representation builds an artist's brand, which increases their market value, which in turn reinforces the gallery's brand.

This deep entanglement of art and commerce has led to a blurring of the lines between artistic expression and advertising. The journalist Rob Walker coined the term "murketing" to describe the strategy of selling products through cultural association rather than overt branding campaigns. Artists, in turn, have adopted the language of branding as a subject of critique. Ai Weiwei's Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1994) directly confronts this collision of cultural value and corporate branding. Banksy has repeatedly subverted his own brand, as when he set up a stall in Central Park selling original canvases for $60, which were almost entirely ignored by passersby.

The convergence is perhaps most acute in the relationship between new media artists and advertising agencies. As the artist and researcher Golan Levin has argued, new media artists often function as the "unpaid R&D of ad agencies," with their experimental prototypes and techniques later being adopted for commercial campaigns. Projects like The Artvertiser, a software platform that allows users to replace public advertisements with art in real-time through a handheld device, represent a direct, tactical response—an attempt to reclaim the urban visual landscape from corporate messaging and turn it back into a space for cultural expression.

Section 6: The Digital Dematerialization: Data, Networks, and Bitcoin

The 21st century has accelerated the transition of both art and money from tangible objects to dematerialized, networked information. This shift is epitomized by the emergence of Bitcoin, the first decentralized digital currency. Created in 2008 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin operates on a peer-to-peer network, with no central authority to issue currency or track transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the network through a process of "mining," where users dedicate computing power to solve complex cryptographic puzzles to validate transactions and secure the network.

Bitcoin represents a fundamental challenge to the state's monopoly on currency, a system that has been in place since the Axial Age. It is a return to a peer-based network of trade, albeit a technologically sophisticated one, with historical parallels to networks like the Silk Road. This new financial ecosystem has, in turn, created its own cultural landscape. The anonymous online black market known as Silk Road, which used Bitcoin as its primary currency, was run by an operator who adopted the moniker "Dread Pirate Roberts," a fictional character whose name is passed down from person to person—a perfect metaphor for a decentralized, pseudonymous system.

Artists have been quick to explore this new territory. Brad Troemel's Silk Road Objects series involved collecting, replicating, and exhibiting artifacts purchased from the online marketplace, placing them in conversation with the aesthetics of rebellion and creating a feedback loop between illicit action and its fetishization in the art world. Other artists have engaged directly with the mechanics of cryptocurrency. Max F. Albrecht's Bitcoin für Euro (2012) converted an old vending machine to dispense Bitcoin wallets in exchange for Euros, while the "Photo Hour" project allowed patrons to commission a photographer for an hour using Bitcoin, documenting the interests of a new, networked community.

This dematerialization is part of a broader "algoworld," a term used by technologist Kevin Slavin to describe a world increasingly designed for and controlled by algorithms. From high-frequency trading that shapes stock prices to the recommendation engines that curate our cultural consumption, complex computer programs are writing code we can no longer fully understand, with implications we cannot control. For artists, this presents both a new medium and a new subject for critique. The challenge is to navigate this landscape of data, to make visible the invisible infrastructures that shape our reality, and to ask what remains of human value in a world of pure information.

Section 7: The Art World Machine: Auctions, Fairs, and Studios

The contemporary art world operates through a series of highly structured, interdependent institutions: the auction house, the art fair, and the artist's studio. Each serves a distinct function in the creation, validation, and circulation of value.

The auction house, exemplified by Christie's, is a public theatre where value is performed and solidified. It is a high-stakes environment where the rhetoric of "genius" and "masterpiece" is used to drive sales. Primary dealers often view auctions with suspicion, as the public, and sometimes volatile, pricing can disrupt the carefully managed career of an artist. A record price can be a boon, but a failure to sell—a "buy-in"—is likened to a "visit from the grim reaper". The auction is an "instant evaluation," a barometer of the market where collectors come not just to buy, but to "smell the perfume" of public taste. The seating arrangement itself is a map of status, a "whole ceremony" where collectors, dealers, and vendors perform their roles.

Art fairs, such as Art Basel, represent another critical node in the network. They are massive, temporary marketplaces that function as a "United Nations" of the gallery world, bringing together hundreds of dealers under one roof. The director of Art Basel, Samuel Keller, emphasizes a focus on "art and quality," with the belief that "the money will come later". Yet, the atmosphere is one of anxious commerce, a spectacle of "anxious shoppers" and intense competition. For collectors like Don and Mera Rubell, the fair is a place to exercise a "personal vision," arguing that collecting is a "lifetime process" and not merely about writing a check.

At the origin of all this activity is the artist's studio, which, in the case of a global star like Takashi Murakami, functions more like a high-tech factory. His studios in New York and Japan are linked by iChat and conference calls, operating with silent, white-walled efficiency. The work is a collective labor, with assistants meticulously applying paint according to a "paint by numbers with a twist" system, ensuring no trace of an individual's hand is visible. Murakami himself acknowledges the immense pressure and tension involved in producing work for a major show, a process so demanding that "several staff quit". This industrial model of production, where the artist acts as a CEO and creative director, stands in stark contrast to the romantic myth of the lone genius, revealing the complex labor that underpins the seemingly effortless objects that populate the art market.

Section 8: The Alchemists of Capital: Art, Labor, and the Body

Capitalism, as a social relation, defines our behavior and forces us to sell our time to reproduce our material conditions. Within this framework, artists have long explored the raw materials of life—labor, the body, and the very substances of production—as sites of alchemical transformation and critique.

The artist's own body can become the medium. In Blue Remix (2007), Yann Marussich presents a "manifesto for immobility," remaining motionless for an hour as mysterious blue liquid, a "choreography of blue secretions," oozes from his skin. The performance confuses the inside and outside, transforming a biological process into a hallucinatory, sculptural event. This use of the body pushes against the commodification of the art object by presenting an ephemeral, visceral experience.

The production of food, a fundamental form of labor, is another area of investigation. Kim Waldron's Beautiful Creatures (2010-2013) confronts the "profound disconnection that we live with in relationship to food". By placing herself in the roles of slaughterer, butcher, and cook, and mounting the heads of the animals as trophies, she forces a visceral confrontation with the transformation of living beings into meat.

This alchemical impulse—transforming one substance into another to question its value—is made explicit in works that engage with gold. Nicolas Baier, in Nugget (2010), asked people to give him objects they loved, then melted them all down into a single, dense nugget, collapsing personal sentiment into raw material. In a more scientific vein, Adam W. Brown and Kazem Kashefi's The Great Work of the Metal Lover (2012) re-enacts the alchemical dream of creating gold. Using a bioreactor, they employ extremophilic bacteria to metabolize toxic gold chloride and precipitate pure 24K gold, literally producing the precious metal through a biological process.

These practices highlight the precarity of artistic labor. In response to economic and political pressures, artists have formed collectives to explore alternatives to capitalism. The Tak Cheong Lane collective, formed during Hong Kong's Occupy Central movement in 2011, engages in projects like a gift-based economy ("Oh yes, it's free!") and "Dumpster Diving" to raise awareness about resource conservation, demonstrating a direct engagement with the politics of labor and value outside the traditional art market.

Section 9: The Price of Belief: Collectors, Critics, and Hedge Fund Sharks

The value of art is not intrinsic; it is a delicate consensus built on belief, managed by a network of powerful players, and fueled by immense capital. As the collector Emily Hall Tremaine noted, the motivations for collecting are always a mix of a genuine love of art, investment potential, and social promise.

At the apex of this system are the collectors, particularly the Wall Street money managers and hedge fund billionaires who view art as another asset class. Art consultant Sandy Heller manages the collections of six such individuals, including Steve Cohen, whose hedge fund "routinely accounts for as much as 3 percent of the New York Stock Exchange's daily trading". Cohen's collection includes Damien Hirst's iconic shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, an artwork that has become a symbol of the market's speculative frenzy. The question is raised: "Is Damien Hirst's shark owned by a shark?"

This financialization creates a market where, as artist Jasper Johns noted, "art is commerce itself". The art world's ecosystem is designed to manage and inflate this commerce. The trade magazine ArtForum, for example, is described by its own publisher as being run by an "atheist priest who understands the salutary effect of religion," and by a contributing editor as a place of "endless blowing of windbags who lift and separate art from the marketplace through a strategic use of theory". This strategic use of language builds the mystique and intellectual scaffolding that justifies enormous prices.

Artists themselves have a complex relationship with this system. Tracey Emin's work I've got it all (2000) shows the artist clutching fistfuls of cash, a raw and ambiguous statement on success and greed. Others, like Caleb Larsen, create works that directly embed market logic into their form. His piece A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009) is a black box programmed to perpetually auction itself on eBay, with the artist receiving a 15 percent commission on any profitable resale. This work literalizes the idea that art's existence can be defined by its eternal circulation as a commodity. Ultimately, the system runs on the principle articulated by the artist Barnett Newman: "The meaning must come from the seeing, not the talking". Yet in a market dominated by hedge fund sharks and complex financial instruments, the talking—the theory, the criticism, the branding—is precisely what constructs the price.

Section 10: The Money of the Mind: Language, Value, and the Holy Grail

The history of money is a history of abstraction, a gradual dematerialization from substance to symbol. This transformation, from the electrum coins of ancient Lydia, whose value was tied to their metallic content, to the electric money of today, where matter "does not matter," has profound implications for how we understand the relationship between things and ideas, or value and language.

The philosopher Marc Shell traces this "genealogy of the money form" as "the study of a new logic that is the money of the mind". The introduction of coinage in ancient Greece coincided with a new kind of philosophical inquiry. Plato, for instance, criticized the Sophists as "merchants of the mind" not just because they accepted payment, but because their very discourse, their mode of exchanging meanings, mirrored the logic of monetary transactions. This confrontation with the economic form embedded within thought itself was a foundational moment for philosophy.

Conclusions: Transmutations of Trust — Art, Money, Reparations and the Reinscription of Value

In the unstable theatres of belief where art and money intersect, we find not a static truth but a volatile grammar of trust, transaction, and transformation. As Georg Simmel argued in The Philosophy of Money, money is the most abstract form of life—it mediates not just exchange but the very logic of modern subjectivity. Art, too, operates in this abstract realm, translating materials into meaning, desire into form, and value into spectacle. Both systems—artistic and monetary—are maintained through ritualized performances, market scaffolds, and ideological inscriptions.

Georgina Adam, in Big Bucks, exposes the speculative infrastructures and opaque mechanics behind contemporary art’s financialization. Freeports—offshore storage zones for artworks—are perhaps the ultimate symbol of this system: cultural objects suspended in limbo, exempt from tax, untouched by viewership, and used as vessels of capital preservation. They perpetuate what might be called a neo-colonial economy of aesthetic extractivism—where value accrues through secrecy, rarity, and the inertia of elite consensus rather than public engagement or shared understanding.

This elite opacity is precisely what the Guerrilla Girls target in their feminist interventions. Their iconic poster, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” (1989), makes explicit the gendered biases in art institutions. Their work cuts through the euphemistic veil of the art economy to expose how race, gender, and institutional power construct visibility and value. In contrast to this critique, artists like Jeff Koons aestheticize capital itself. His reflective balloon dogs, with their factory-polished surfaces, do not subvert but participate in the logic of luxury branding, seducing collectors with the sheen of eternal optimism and empty formalism.

Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014) intervenes forcefully against such anesthetized surfaces. Installed in the defunct Domino Sugar refinery, Walker’s monumental sugar-coated sphinx confronted viewers with the haunting legacies of slavery, colonial extraction, and the hypersexualization of Black femininity. It was not a commodity to be circulated but a confrontation to be endured—temporary, site-bound, and ethically charged. Where Koons offers reflection, Walker demands reckoning, reparations, de-colonialization.

Digital interventions extend these critiques into new terrains. Brooke Singer’s Swipe (2005) exposes the invisible infrastructures of data capitalism by allowing users to retrieve and examine the personal information encoded in their credit cards. Sommerer and Mignonneau’s The Value of Art (2012) inverts the gaze of valuation entirely: audience biofeedback becomes a live metric, translating emotional response into visual currency. These works foreground the algorithmic and biometric systems that now modulate both economic and affective life.

In Michael Alstad’s Bank of Symbiosis: Take Heart (1997), value becomes vegetal. Seedlings sprouting in the shape of capitalist slogans offer a quiet counterpoint to the glinting hysteria of market-driven art. It evokes a model of symbiosis rather than speculation, an invitation to re-root value in growth, time, and ecology. These post-capitalist gestures—sometimes playful, sometimes militant—form a dispersed field of resistance, where artists refuse commodification not through negation but through radical re-inscription.

Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World reads the scene as a series of micro-worlds, each with its own logics of legitimacy. Her ethnographic lens reframes the art market not merely as economic spectacle but as a ritualized ecology where meaning, power, and belief circulate alongside currency. The work of art becomes, finally, an unstable fulcrum: it balances between object and event, brand and rupture, speculation and sanctuary.

We return, then, to the premise: art and money are not simply opposites or allies. They are twin apparitions of human abstraction—one leaning toward transcendence, the other toward exchange. Both are kept alive by collective faith. Both are haunted by inequality. And both, in their most luminous or corrosive moments, teach us that value is never given. It is always made, remade, and at times—resisted.