Philosophy Discussion Forums

(note: I'll be talking about US money and it's okay for the OP to bring up any country's currency for any time period)

The US manufactures bills in a number of denominations. They strive to make them appealing to the public (although to my eye, it looks like monopoly money). They also strive to use advanced features to differentiate from counterfeit money.

So what do you think of the US bills? Do they appeal to you? Do you think the bills qualify as art? Do you think they should be made more artistic?

PhilX

Philosophy Explorer wrote:(note: I'll be talking about US money and it's okay for the OP to bring up any country's currency for any time period)

The US manufactures bills in a number of denominations. They strive to make them appealing to the public (although to my eye, it looks like monopoly money). They also strive to use advanced features to differentiate from counterfeit money.

So what do you think of the US bills? Do they appeal to you? Do you think the bills qualify as art? Do you think they should be made more artistic?

PhilX

Since I live in the US I am used to our money. I liked the original bills where the featured person was smaller. Our money now looks more like play money. Other country's money looked odd to me and seemed like play money. I do think our money is art, but then so is any money. There is a lot of skill and the emblems all mean something.

Philosophy Explorer wrote:(note: I'll be talking about US money and it's okay for the OP to bring up any country's currency for any time period)

The US manufactures bills in a number of denominations. They strive to make them appealing to the public (although to my eye, it looks like monopoly money). They also strive to use advanced features to differentiate from counterfeit money.

So what do you think of the US bills? Do they appeal to you? Do you think the bills qualify as art? Do you think they should be made more artistic?

PhilX

This is just one example where art and function become one; where the function of art exceeds the aesthetic. For me there is no better example of art and money than the country that invented the first coinage: ancient Greece. Athens is reputed to be the first place in earth to have a coinage.
Here it is the Silver "owl" and the first ever coin. The art of the coin reached its apogee in later examples all over the Greek World.
It's difficult to find the best example as there are so many.

When you realise that these coins were made in mirror image individually carved and polished on a die around 25mm wide and the blank silver was struck in one action to transfer the image.

Nothing superseded the beauty of the greek coin until milling was introduced in the late medieval period. The most common greek coin is probably the tetradracm, or "stater".

These coins became so ubiquitous that they held their value for generations and even ended up in Viking hoards, having been in circulation for a thousand years.

-- Updated June 24th, 2014, 4:32 pm to add the following --

As for American paper; I've travelled to many countries and think that the US notes are among the worst designed and poorly conceived in the world.

The first major problem is that all the notes are the same size and colour. Most countries consider those that are visually challenged and ensure that notes are easy to distinguish. There has been recent attempts to improve the notes by enlarging the number font but they have not gone far enough for blind people.

Take a look at the B of England set.

Each is bigger than the next, each has a distinctive colour and each has a symbol: blue circle £5, red/brown rhombus £10, purple square £20, and red triangle for the £50.

The set show is not the most current, as these were withdrawn and the number int he top left enlarged. E.g.



The reverse is regularly changed and features an eminent Brit; Stevenson(now replaced with , Dickens (now replaced with Darwin) , Farraday, Wren.

US money is the easiest to, and the most common, counterfeit in the world. Because it rarely changes, it is simple and boring, only includes two colours, and is least complex. The slow arm of the state has finally figured this out, but until they devalue and withdraw the old notes it's pointless adding a bit of red to confound the counterfeiters unless you make old notes worthless.

Many a bank robber has been thwarted in the UK due to the regular change of note design, and the withdrawal of old notes, so that the stash they hid before their incarceration has become worthless whilst they were in prison. The B of E generally does a major change at least every ten years; to age the portrait of the monarch, but also to re-arrange the design.

-- Updated June 25th, 2014, 5:53 pm to add the following --

ERRatum: The reverse is regularly changed and features an eminent Brit; Stevenson(now replaced with , Dickens (now replaced with Darwin) , Farraday, Wren.

Should read: The reverse of the note features an eminent Brit. The image shows £5 Stevenson, the inventor of the first passenger train; £10 Charles Dickens; £20 Faraday; and £50 Christopher Wren architect. These are often changed and the £5 now features Elizabeth Fry; £10 Charles Darwin for his recent bicentenary of his birth; £20 Adam Smith; and £50 Boulton and Watt the inventors of the Steam Engine.

Good points there from Hog Rider about the combination of artistic and practical merits in ancient Greek coinage and modern British bank notes. (Although I've often wondered why the 5 pound note has Frankie Howerd on the back of it.)

But I don't entirely agree about the US dollar. As suggested by slang terms like "greenback", I think its almost uniform colour has a kind of iconic artistic and historical status of its own (and the reason for the use of that particular green colour is itself an interesting story in the history of industrial chemistry). It seems inconceivable to me that the US dollar could be anything other than long and green (on the back).

But I do agree about the practical difficulties that this kind of uniformity creates.

Another reason for supporting the artistic merit of the US dollar is in contrast with the Euro. I'm personally in two minds about the economic benefits of the single European currency but I'm a lot more sure about it when considered purely in artistic terms. When the euro notes were being designed, it was apparently decided, in typical EU compromise style, not to risk offending anyone by putting anything which is significant to particular European countries on the notes. The result, as you can see here, is that we have pictures of things like generic cathedral windows. Not even the windows of any specific cathedral in a specific European city are allowed, for fear of offending all the other European cities and their cathedrals (and their windows).



The celebration of great figures from history, as pointed by Hog Rider in the case of the pound, is sadly not allowed for the Euro.

Contrast that with the kinds of notes we had in Europe before. I remember, back in 1990, when the Euro was just a gleam in Jacques Delors' eye, travelling around Europe by train (Inter-Railing as it was called). One of the most interesting parts of that experience back then was getting to grips with the various currencies. Just look at this magnificent artwork on the French 100 franc note:



depicting iconic art romanticizing the French revolution. (Eugene Delacroix - "Liberty Leading the People". The strong, bold, defiant female figure embodying the liberated French nation.)

Try putting a bare-breasted national-flag-brandishing woman on a banknote now and see if the comity will allow it. I think the french have produced some of the most beautiful banknotes in the world. Although I guess they did that largely by depicting works of art on the notes, which arguably means that the notes themselves don't quality as works of art in their own right. Still, I guess the fact that they were willing to consign all of these notes to history and replace them with the bland self-consciously inoffensive Euro notes is a testament to their (initial) enthusiasm for European monetary union.

I remember travelling through Yugoslavia just before it broke up into separate countries and the term "ethnic cleansing" became familiar to us all. They'd just had to revalue their currency, with the result that we had two separate types of Yugoslavian dinar to deal with, one of which had about 6 more zeros on the end of each denomination than the other. Here's an example from the early '90s. Checkout those zeros:



You can say what you like about economic instability, hyper-inflation and bloody internecine war, but it does at least make for relatively interesting bank notes that tourists can keep as souvenirs. (I still have some of those Yugoslavian notes somewhere in my attic, along with the compulsory pieces of concrete chipped out of the, at the time, rapidly disappearing Berlin Wall. I presume most of it is now in various attics around the world. I don't have any euros up there yet.)

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If it's possible to conclude any wider point about all this, maybe it is that when human beings come together for the common good and cooperate with each other it might be a great thing for averting wars and creating peace and prosperity, but it doesn't do the art any good. Art needs conflict, war, separation, alienation and religious extremism. All that kind of stuff. So maybe, on balance, the beige-coloured-slacks blandness of the Euro is a good thing?

(Insert Orson Welles Quote about cuckoo clocks from "The Third Man" here.)

The Euro notes are ugly but highly functional. As for avoiding offence? Church symbolism? Really? It pisses me off.

When I saw the 50 billion note above I was reminded what a great man Mugabe was to make all his people trillionarries!!



When these were printed, they were so worthless that many of them were ebay-ed. I bought too early thinking that the 10 billion note was pretty good. But even when the biggest of the notes were offered for sale many of them sold for the price of the postage.

I note that they replaced a note with almost the same design.



I'm not sure what the stones signify, but I like them. I assume it is related to the "Great Zimbabwe", build by the Shona in the 11thC and centre of a powerful civilisation lasting 100s of years. When discovered by whites in the 19thC, they thought it must have been built by white people, and hence the myths of Ayesha "she who must be Obeyed", and the Queen of Sheba going south to build it , even a lost Roman legion. ....

As for your comment about 'coming together'.

If it's possible to conclude any wider point about all this, maybe it is that when human beings come together for the common good and cooperate with each other it might be a great thing for averting wars and creating peace and prosperity, but it doesn't do the art any good.

Obviously when people come together to cooperate this is just as likely to lead to war, than avert it. I think if Europe has achieved a full Federal Union, it would be strutting across the world like the USA "policing". Maybe the insipid, pseudo-union in a continual state of skepticism is better than a Federal State?