Money. It makes the world go round, if Cabaret’s Emcee is to be believed. Of course, seven years prior to Kander and Ebb’s enigmatic narrator extolling the virtues of the mark, the yen, the buck or the pound, things weren’t quite the same in Germany. Hyperinflation was so catastrophic that wheelbarrows of marks couldn’t buy you a newspaper, let alone make the world turn. There’s a famous shot from 1923 in which a grinning woman can be seen clad in a dress made of hundreds of worthless notes. Looking at Susan Stockwell’s 2010 Money Dress, one of the standout pieces from the Ashmolean’s Money Talks exhibit, that photo from history class swam back into my memory. Stockwell’s intent, to venerate female pioneers across history via a medium associated with women’s labour, is certainly very different, borne out of celebration, not destitution. But it’s intriguing to think how such divergent circumstances can produce such similar concepts.
As an anti-capitalist, I’m of the opinion that much of our unhappiness could be solved if it didn’t hinge on the movement of small green pieces of paper (or beeps on a phone, in this day and age - sorry, Douglas). But money itself is a fascinating subject of study in part because of its many contradictions. It can one minute confer power and the next be incredibly volatile. It is a cultural archive, not just of monarchs or governments but their subjects’ sensibilities. It can provide artistic inspiration while hemming in the creativity of artists.
Money Talks’ first chamber puts that latter tension front and centre. In the same room where Rubens creates delicately rendered portraits of Roman emperors from coins of classical antiquity, Koloman Moser, often unsuccessfully, wrestles with the Austro-Hungarian bank to accept his exquisitely realised and dreamy note designs - ‘too Secessionist’, by their estimation. Same goes for the daring Cubist designs offered by John Kavanaugh for the first coins of Edward VIII’s abortive reign, which the Mint declared “cannot be taken seriously” (then again, given whom Edward was rubbing shoulders with at the time, one can imagine he wouldn’t want his art too radical).
We also see the evolution of coin designs from Percy Metcalfe and Eric Gill. Metcalfe’s heavily stylised design of St George killing the dragon giving way to sleek, pared back designs of seagulls and lions after a frosty response from king and country. Gill similarly prunes his floral insignias as time goes on, though he can’t resist posing one equestrian portrait as though the horse is relieving itself - Gill’s taking the piss, unsurprisingly, didn’t make it to print. It’s an artistic battle of wills between institutions wanting to play into popular tastes while fearing the subversion that might come with them, a hint to the disruptive potential of money as a medium that future rooms will explore.
The second chamber is more concerned with global cultural attitudes to wealth. Royalists will, I’m sure, be delighted with the archiving of notes featuring Queen Elizabeth from various Commonwealth denominations, showcasing the elegant portrait work of Anthony Buckley, Dorothy Wilding and Peter Grugeon. But this section is not simply permitted to sit comfortably; rather, it is placed end to end with pieces that are more critical of the role money plays as a tool of the ruling class.
Meschac Gaba’s Bank or Economy: Inflation (2016) places defunct Zimbabwean banknotes on a market stall as though waiting to be traded off. In the wake of inflation, the fallibility of governments are revealed and money is reduced to its material properties. It’s one of the most potent visual conversations in the exhibit, especially with the necessary context that the introduction of coins and banknotes into African economies was a direct result of European colonial rule.
Similarly, Mansour Ciss Kanassy’s Afro Money creates an entire imagined denomination responding to the colonial legacy of the CFA Franc - on it, the continent of Africa is constrained by bars. The cheeky, nose-thumbing irreverence of Banksy’s Skit Note Diana tenner and the British values-psychedelia of Grayson Perry’s Comfort Blanket are certainly fun and poppy, like you’re sitting at the cool kid’s table, but set against the confrontational urgency of Gaba and Kanassy’s pieces, they are blown out of the water.
It’s a much-needed perspective that I think is more effective than the ‘Eastern’/‘Western’ dialogue set across the opposing walls - while the artefacts used to demonstrate Chinese and Indian symbols of wealth are utterly beautiful in their craftsmanship, it’s a bit simplistic to boil things down to a dichotomy of “‘West’ thinks money bad, ‘East’ thinks money good” without asking why that might be. Often ‘wealth’ and ‘prosperity’ has a broader definition for different cultures, or places more of an emphasis on wealth as a tool for the community rather than the individual, such as in the principles of Confucius or Zakat in the Five Pillars of Islam; with a little more curiosity, this could have been a much broader conversation than it ended up being.
In the third chamber, the materiality of money is embraced in full - pulped, shredded, molded into cakes (Geldkuchen [2001], Ingrid Pitzer) or sewn into dresses (Money Dress [2010], Susan Stockwell). One piece in particular encapsulates the mood of this more post-modern collection. John Murphy’s The Art of Exchange series mounts and captions two practically worthless banknotes featuring the art of Dürer and Holbein the Younger, actively manipulating their value by elevating them to the status of ‘artwork’. Money and art have one thing fundamentally in common for all their conflict - their value depends on us. It is our collective belief that grants these little signifiers their value, and that value can, pardon the pun, turn on a dime, something that becomes ever clearer as we enter an increasingly cashless world*. Money Talks is more than just a display of numismatic curiosities - instead, it offers a nuanced and critical examination of the fraught dance between monetary and cultural capital. If you’re thinking about a visit, it’s worth it, in every sense.
(*Sidenote, can we please stop lending credence to NFTs and cryptocurrency? I understand that it would be remiss not to mention them in the context of currency’s future, but aside from a brief mention of their ‘volatile’ markets, the exhibit is remarkably uncritical of an incredibly dubious and largely unregulated industry. After all, what could be better than a completely unaccountable system of absolute strangers and con artists assembled together in a bizarre cryptofascist commune? A caption claims that it grants online artists authority over their work and that the Ethereum blockchain’s energy efficiency is comparable with standard computing, neither of which are accurate, and here is a very extensive explanation as to why. The inclusion of a ‘rare Pepe’ in this exhibit, without mention of the mounting evidence of cryptocurrencies being used to fund the Neo-Nazi and far right organisations that have adopted the cartoon frog as a symbol, leaves a sour taste in my mouth in an exhibit I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.