From MoneyArt to forgery. Banknote as metaphor of Economy Rethinking

Abstract

If Twenty Century Art can be considered as a sort of “logic meanings overturn”, how could Art be the alternative to the nowadays dominant value, that is Money? How could Art establish a semantic field able to say something actually different from the image of a contemporaneity so subjected to media power or to our post-Fordist Economy? Marcel Duchamp had been already fascinated by economy and its symbolic meanings. With works like Tzanck cheque (1919) or Obligations pour la roulette de Monte Carlo (1924), he had highlighted the arbitrariness of the economic exchange. An arbitrariness that can easily actualize itself through currency since currency is an abstraction similar to the artistic one, as Daniel Spoerri said. The banknote have fascinated many artists, first by its form (the trompe l’oeil by the American artists of the end of the XIX century, like William M.Harnett, JohnHaberle, Charles A.Maurer, VictorDubreuile, or the collages by Ray Johnson, Robert Morris or Akasegawa Genpei) and then by its substance, as to say as a medium- plastic element, vehicle of ideological and symbolic messages (Cildo Meireles, Lee Lozano, Cesare Pietroiusti). And at last the interest in banknotes sometimes comes true with the creation of false bills and by really making them circulate, so giving life to real alternative economies (Atelier Van Lieshout, J.S.G Boggs, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle of e-flux).