Why do 6” inked-green cotton-linen sheets, part bacteria/part cocaine, with dead presidents hold value? Why are diamonds de-facto precious engagement stones? Why do humans pay exorbitant sums for high-value blue-chip art? Money is a lifeblood of prosperous societies as it touches all aspects of life. Often a misconceived, taboo, and acrimonious topic, it's increasingly rising to the fore in our charged and dynamic era of breakneck consumption, wealth disparities, moral iniquities, and affordability crises. Since 2015 I've been probing the psycho-social economic aspects of money as a tool for signaling value.

Like language, money is a medium facilitating exchange in human action, a protocol for communicating value and coordinating prices in market economies. As perceptions of value shape-shift sentiment, money's roots lie in human prosperity/innovation, status/privilege, ethics/control, politics/war, et al. While value is a linguistic-behavioral abstraction and social construct—intrinsic belief systems of interactive trust in social bonds—money is one of civilization's bedrock technologies. (continued below images…)

Philosopher Adam Smith argued the origin of human thought and development of language stem from an innate desire to trade; Friedrich Nietzsche further suggested the psychological effects of selling, buying, and value calculation predate the beginnings of social structure; both believed the benefits of exchange are what led to the creation of commercial markets. As far back as Aristotle, he posited money is social adhesion, fostering connection in relationships in the spirit of fertile soil reaping abundant harvests. In a multitude of ways, from benevolent to nefarious, exchange guides many social, economic, and political transactions.

Societies evolved toward adopting scarce and saleable (readily-available, recognizable, and accepted) commodities to settle accounts, trusting these items will maintain value for saving and trading tomorrow. Historically, quality or “hard” monies have typically espoused properties of portability, durability, divisibility, scarcity, and unforgeable costliness (not subject to dilution), ultimately maintaining their value and purchasing power through time and space.

While nations indiscriminately inflate currencies out-of-thin-air (“ex nihilo”) and pivot into cashless paragons of unsustainable debt, reckless policies, and managed illusions of stacked promises, history's arc dictates such distortions foment institutionalized cronyism, malfeasance, parasitism, and plunder, ultimately leading to pernicious imbalances, oppression, violence, and devolution. Again, as history dictates, disregarding moral hazard (risks others incur) and extricating accountability in financial systems is a recipe doomed to inevitable failure.

As it seems humanity lingers at the existential gates of epochal paradigm shifts, our zeitgeist's chaos incites ontological scrutiny into incumbent establishments and preconceived, fallacious notions notions of money. Begging a salient question seldom asked: what traits of diluted, broken money drive communities to inescapable strife? How is value determined and expressed? Its essential nature notwithstanding, what does civilization stand to benefit by separating money and state? For time immemorial civilization's track record is a disastrous, unmitigated flop in using defective money throughout societies.

Tamper-resistant ethical monies are pivotal for long-term preservation of freedom, social stability, mental health, human capital, economic energy, achievement, peace, and our most precious commodity, time. By omitting unbounded deficits and endless credit issuance from spigots of currency creation, uncorrupted money disincentivizes grift and deception, reverses moral debasement, defunds murder and war, reduces swollen bureaucracies, and consensualizes trade by empowering respect for property rights. Gatekeepers of bloated and politically-driven legacy institutions insidiously entrap and pilfer the savings of everyday working people in extra-democratic, rigged systems orchestrated to endlessly manipulate in order to function. Privatizing gains, socializing losses; not serving moral people, the linchpin of societies; extracting value and productive human energy.

Here I present diverse historic/contemporary in/tangible objects, some defunct and lost to history, others quite valuable, few technologically novel and revolutionary. Bathed in diffuse light suspended against black isolates form, shape, nuanced ambiguity. A compelling array of artifacts emerge from civilization's volatile pursuit of power, desire, commerce, beauty, preservation, and speculation.

Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, I care not who makes the laws.
—Attributed to M.A. Rothschild

Earnest thanks and recognition for the organizations and individuals that supported this project: Museum of American Finance, American Numismatic Association, Edward C. Rochette Money Museum, National Archeological Museum of Athens, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Heritage Auctions, Glenn P.