The Art of Money

Gangsta Abe, Russian plagiarism, and how to pay for food with your art.

Previously, we’ve looked at how artists use ordinary materials to transform them into incredible art creations — from paper to cardboard to toilet paper rolls to whole books. Today, we turn to the one “material” that makes the world go ’round: Money. Here are five of our favorites.

SCOTT CAMPBELL

After our recent obsession with surgical book sculptures, we’re turning to tattoo artist Scott Campbell‘s incredible carved currency sculptures. Beyond the indisputable aesthetic merit of his work, there also seems to be a subtle undercurrent of political commentary, which we quite enjoy.

There’s an excellent recent New York Times story about Campbell and his work — worth the read.

MONEYGAMI

You may recall these Japanese moneygami from pickings past — the delightfully irreverent origami portraits of world leaders gracing various bank notes, outfitted with entertainingly incongruous hats and head attire.

Explore the rest of these bad boys for some comic relief at the expense of expenses.

ART MONEY

Art Money is a curious project that seeks to offer a global alternative currency — a barter object to use instead of money that is both an exposure vehicle for participating artists worldwide and a financial crutch that allows them to support themselves while focusing on their art.

The idea is simple — artists create an original art money “bank note” measuring 12x18cm, which becomes the equivalent of 200 Danish Kroner (roughly $34), growing in value by five Euro per year for seven years. This money can be used as currency within the Art Money ecosystem, which includes various registered shops and businesses, as well as Art Money hosts who accept this payment for accommodation for traveling artists.

We love the idea of “paying” for necessities with original art — we’ve seen it before with Wants For Sale, and this recent news of the world’s biggest taxi tip offers another delightful example of art as a transactional alternative. Intrigued? Join the project and create your own art money or register your business to accept it.

Thanks, @haverholm

THE ART OF MONEY

For his senior thesis project, Cuban design student Yordan Silvera embarked upon an ambitious exploration of the aesthetic qualities of money. The result was The Art of Money — a design analysis of the typography, iconography, color and techniques used on different currencies from around the world.

The resulting book is absolutely stunning — we just wish Silvera would make the content available online and/or offer physical copies of the book for sale.

MARK WAGNER

Brooklyn-based artist Mark Wagner is a master of the X-acto knife. His intricate currency collages look laser-cut but are all meticulously hand-carved to a remarkable effect.

The one dollar bill is the most ubiquitous piece of paper in America. Collage asks the question: what might be done to make it something else? It is a ripe material: intaglio printed on sturdy linen stock, covered in decorative filigree, and steeped in symbolism and concept. Blade and glue transform it — reproducing the effects of tapestries, paints, engravings, mosaics, and computers-striving for something bizarre, beautiful, or unbelievable… the foreign in the familiar.” ~ Mark Wagner

So brilliant are his collages that they’ve incited the highest form of flattery — shameless plagiarism by Russian design getup Art Money. Case in point.

BONUS

If you find yourself fascinated by the design and art direction of currency, we highly recommend checking out Currency Museum — an incredibly rich, albeit tedious to navigate, collection of banknote designs from 155 countries, which is just 40 short of all the world’s recognized political states.

*** UPDATE 04.29 ***

Thanks to commenter C.K. Wilde, who pointed us to some of his incredible money art on Alternating Currency — arguably the most ambitious and, we imagine, painstakingly crafted of the bunch.

See more of Wilde’s work here — it’s absolutely amazing.

We appreciate money not just aesthetically. Especially now that we’ve lost our newsletter sponsor. This being a backyard operation, we may not be able to sustain it for much longer. Please consider helping out with a small donation.

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Subway Etiquette Posters: New York, Toronto, Tokyo

Sardines, anthropomorphic luggage, and what the beach has to do with train doors.

The thing about public space that’s both a blessing and a curse is that we have to share it. And in order to avoid complete anarchy, we need a set of commonly agreed upon rules to govern this sharing — a code of etiquette. Subways, with their boisterous highschoolers, gospel-preaching nomads and vocal trinket sellers, are among the most anarchy-prone of public spaces. So today, we look at three brilliantly irreverent efforts to foster subway etiquette with wit, humor and a wink at authority.

NEW YORK

Last week, artist Jason Shelowitz, a.k.a. Jay Shells, took New York’s Metropolitan Transit System by storm with his clever guerrilla campaign promoting subway etiquette to combat people’s chief complaints. He surveyed 100 commuters on their top pet peeves, then designed a series of posters modeled after the typical MTA Service Changes announcements, silkscreened 400 of them and began deploying them under the “Metropolitan Etiquette Authority.”

Shells encourages people to take the posters home before the MTA starts taking them down in typical no-fun fashion.

TORONTO

Never late to the sticking-it-to-the-man party, the Canadian were quick to appropriate Shell’s idea. Only two days after the New York deployment, the good folks at Toronto’s National Post designed their own version of the posters, hijacking TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission, and turning it into TTCC, Toronto Transit Civility Commission. Under TTCC, they released a series of etiquette posters, encouraging the public to print their own copies and plaster them all over the subway.

Decidedly snarkier than the New York ones, these posters do make one question the whole but-Canadians-are-so-much-nicer stereotype.

TOKYO

In a lot of ways, a subway train is full of Hollywood movie set staples — the stuntman diving through the door and escaping its clench by an inch, the diva in the corner powdering her nose, the muscle-jockey doing pull-ups on the hand-grips. The Japanese are here to remind us the subway is no movie set with a series of tongue-in-cheek but very to-the-point etiquette posters that are tragicomically accurate in the stereotypical annoyances they depict.

Of course, the directive to go home and exercise binge drinking does raise a whole other set of concerns, but we’ll settle for it if it keeps the chin-up masters at bay.

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The Beauty of Maps: Seeing Art in Cartography

What 13th-century astronomy has to do with the shape of the internet and the British Library.

We love maps. And we love data visualization, of which maps are among the earliest and most ubiquitous examples. As location continues to tickle the tips of trend analysts’ tongues and location-based applications take over the mobile landscape, it’s interesting — if not necessary — to understand the historical context of our relationship with location and geography.

That’s exactly what a new BBC series titled The Beauty of Maps: Seeing Art in Cartography explores.

The site features five of the world’s most beautiful historical maps, five of the most ambitious and fascinating digital ones available today, and video highlights that explore the stories and cultural contexts behind these maps. (While the video content may be restricted to people in the UK, we recently uncovered a nifty way to access blocked content on the web — and it includes a step-by-step guide to cracking the BBC iPlayer specifically.)

From Psalter’s cartography circa 1260 to a map of today’s global data exchange to a colorful NASA map of the dark side of the moon, the site is a treasure trove of cartographic fascination.

The effort is part The Map as Art, part Strange Maps, part essential education for the age of location.

To further indulge your cartographic cravings, we recommend these excellent resources for historical cartography and vintage maps:

• This Wikipedia entry on early world maps is full of gems
• The Old Maps Flickr pool features nearly 1,800 19th- and 20th-century maps
• Strange Maps is still our favorite map destination — we reviewed their equally fantastic recent book here
• The Map Room is another finely curated blog about (mostly antique) maps
• If you live in or are visiting the UK between April 30 and September 19, be sure to check out the excellent Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art exhibition at the British Library
• Ancient World Maps catalogs what the title promises
• Vintage Travel is a small but wonderful set of 14 state maps by Jacques Liozu

Know a great source of cartographic inspiration? Do share below.

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