NORMALLY A MILD-MANNERED PHOTOGRAPHER, Ashkan Sahihi has up to now carefully represented to us the various shades and hues of our world, delicately picking out and combining his subjects into though-provoking series, building a corpus of portraits that attest to a distinctly humanist mindset, free of prejudice, bombast and clever trickery. His images are often challenging, to be sure, but they challenge us only after first drawing us in, assuring us of the artist’s empathy and honest intentions. His portraits of people on drugs, for example, are not at all shocking or distressing to the viewer. They simply invite us to explore, along with the drugged subject, some of our inner feelings that we know and recognize apart from whatever the drug might be doing. Their most surprising aspect is perhaps how easy it is to empathize even with someone so obviously under the influence.

It is a little shocking, therefore, to find Sahihi so blunt as to exhibit, simply and without the distancing mediation of the camera, great amounts of cash money. Money is not customarily a medium for artistic expression and though many would say its influence in art is great, whether through lack or excess, it hardly ever features expressly in the artwork itself, rarely as represented and certainly not, as it were, in the raw.

The shock value is obvious. Large amounts of cash catch the eye as nothing else can. Mounds of money, wads of banknotes, oodles of moolah, spreads of spondulicks. One’s vocabulary fails to convey the sheer vulgarity of the exhibit but at the same time it is irresistibly attractive, mesmerizing, representing wealth, opportunity, freedom and a far better life ... if only one could get one’s mitts on it. Presented as a work of art it is more bombastic than a herd of cloven cows, less subtle than a can of human excrement and more sensationalist than Jesus drowning in piss. Yet the work is also disarmingly simple and almost naively innocent. It’s only money, after all. We handle money every day and we think about it all the time. We know how much of it is needed to buy a pint of milk. If it’s art, then what is it trying to tell us? What can we tell about it?

In 1967 the clever Italian scholar Umberto Eco published a review of two recently released works which he described as “editions numerotées in folio”. The publisher was the Italian National Mint and the works in question were respectively Fifty Thousand Lire and One Hundred Thousand Lire. While the reviewer, Eco, did not object to the novel distribution concept of flooding the market with a large edition but pricing it “beyond the reach of many fanciers’ pocketbooks” he does criticise the incoherence of the content: “What is the purpose of the realistic tone of the portraits, when all the surrounding decoration is clearly inspired by psychedelic hallucinations? ... With vortices, spirals, and undulant textures the work reveals its hallucinatory purpose, its determination to summon to the mind’s eye a universe of fictive values, of perverse invention.” Ultimately, such editions only serve to confirm the statements of contemporary literary theory which posit the work as a pure sign of itself. “Its realism is bogus, as its psychedelic avant-gardisme only hides deeper alienations.”

Eco attempts to examine these banknotes as works of art and despite the satire his attempt is sincere. As a work of art, money is simply to contradictory to pass examination, the detail is overdone, an obvious attempt at making something that has no intrinsic value seem important, exquisite and somehow rare. It is a dressing-up, a sort of rococo convolution that does not sit well with our contemporary sensibilities that lean more towards minimal presentation and conceptual clarity. Money is not even a good medium for art despite all attempts at producing meaningful designs. One doesn’t want money just to get another portrait of Kjarval the painter, the queen or a president or whoever adorns the local currency. Even the generally harmless hobby of numismatics is considered by most eccentric. The urge to collect and admire coins would seem to stem from a kind of misunderstanding: That’s not what money is for.

Can it, then, be used to make art? How, to raise a practical point, would you price the artwork? A dealer would want to sell the work at somewhat above the value of the currency it is made of: The buyer pays for the banknotes and a little extra for what might be considered the artist’s contribution, an art-added-tax, so to speak. But what if the currency in question takes a dive as the dollar has done lately and as currencies around the world do with dispiriting yet unpredictable regularity? Could the new owner exchange it for a more robust currency? This might be seen as on par with conservation work on more traditional artwork, akin to brightening up the faded colours on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, or it might be taken as a desecration, like painting out God’s toga and showing him naked. In the general run of things, one banknote is as good as another and, given the accepted rate of exchange, any currency will do. Does the same apply to the artwork or would making change of it be as bad as melting down a Cellini to realize the value of the bullion? Using money to make art raises strange questions because money is a strange sort of thing to begin with.

Is Money Money?

Money is queer, complex and simple at once, a joy and a burden, a blessing and a curse. It is in some ways a very immediate thing, more constant, more certain, more real than rocks. Yet there is a mystery to money that no one has quite solved. Money serves as the equivalent of all things, a singular measure of value in a world of infinite and confusing diversity, but the apparently singular character of money is deceptive: Money is in fact plural like coin, like quail, like the manifold manifestations of commerce. There is all kinds of money. There is paper money and hard cash and, more recently, plastic money which is really credit and complicates things no end. There is money earned and money spent and money owed and money saved, a penny of which is said to be a penny earned and so the whole cycle begins anew. There is easy money but easy come, easy go. There is clean money and dirty money, the latter to be laundered. Money has a colour and a feel to it but it doesn’t smell, as the emperor Vespasian is said to have noted as he inspected the coins collected for the latrine tax he levied on the Roman loos. Money talks or even swears, as Bob Dylan sang.

What, then, is money, we may well ask? The literature is vague. “Is money money or isn’t money money,” asked Gertrude Stein and went on to complain: “All the trouble really comes from this question is money money.” Money rules by being neither here nor there while being always to the point. It’s hard to pin down, more shadow than shape, an ectoplasm issuing from our collective efforts at exchange. Somerset Maugham said it was “like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five”. All seem to agree on the importance of money, even the socialist Shaw who stated categorically: “Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact as its basis.” But Shaw wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell us what it is.

Money is a Medium of Exchange

One might reasonably feel that the question of money is one for the economists to answer and they have indeed written extensively on money and its role in economy. All agree on certain statements though disagreement is as rife in economics as in any other neat but subtle field of study. Money, they generally agree, is a medium for exchange. It is enormously handy in simplifying the basic economic process of buying and selling, of exchanging one thing for another. As a farmer, in the classic example, I would likely produce only one crop per year but need all sorts of things all year round: Food and clothing certainly; machinery, fertilizer and such for my farm; pocket money for my children and books to read in winter when I take my leisure. It is obviously impractical to make the exchanges all at once, when I have harvested my crop, and then have to store all the various necessaries for the whole year, assuming I can find someone who needs a lot of whatever I planted and has an excess of all the things I will need in return, allowing for unforeseen contingencies. By introducing money into the exchange we, seller and buyer, can make the whole transaction much easier to achieve. My buyer will not need to stock all the things I would anticipate needing and I would not have to store them at home until I need to use them. The process is not only easier but also more dynamic than plain barter, more flexible and fun: Instead of storing salted meat and dry cereals to eat in winter I can buy imported strawberries in January which allows for a whole avalanche of economic relationships to be set in motion, fuelling growth and prosperity around the globe.

John Stuart Mill, one of the often-cited fathers of modern economics, understood these things about money but didn’t think much of it: “There cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money; except in the character of a contrivance for sparing time and labour. It is a machinery for doing quickly and commodiously, what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it.”

Simple though this may seem, it is hard to overestimate the effect that the introduction of money has in economic life and thus in life in general. Subsistence farming is only a short step up from hand-to-mouth squalor. Barter is a vast improvement, allowing for more specialised and more efficient production while also providing for a more varied diet and much more exotic possessions, but it is still hampered by the practical limits of exchange as outlined above. Money lets us defer parts of our economic activity and allows us to sell in one place and buy in another, which leads us to a second important part of its definition: Money is a receptacle for value. By using money we can literally store the value of whatever we produce and sell and then realize that value through a purchase when and wherever the need or the whim is upon us. Money is so practical and clever that it’s no wonder we have a hard time getting by without it.

What money does is to open up a gap in our economic activity. It separates buying and selling and at the same time money itself handily fills the gap. The money as such is neither useful nor nourishing but it buys us whatever tools or sustenance we require. It is the equivalent of all things and everything has a price, even priceless things if your offer is high enough. Money is thus a kind of function, a deferral of trade or a gap in our economy, yet it also has a presence of its own, it is value embodied and needs, itself, a body. Gold is its classicized fairytale form among the westernized tribes, though in principle anything would serve so long as its function was strictly agreed upon: Money is largely a matter of convention as Aristotle was quick to point out. Yet to function as currency money has traditionally been said to need certain qualities: It must not be too common, as sand for example, and it must be fairly durable and not simply rot away before one has a chance to use it. It should also be quite portable or else it would not be more convenient than simply lugging produce around. For a long time it was also held that money should have some value in and of itself and this explains much of the tiresome mystery of gold. To serve as a medium for the exchange of commodities, money will have to be itself a commodity but it must be the most saleable commodity of them all, readily accepted in exchange for any other. This has led to endless problems.

Coin, physical money, only imperfectly serves the noble and abstract aims of money seen as an economic ideal of transparent and equitable, if conveniently deferred, exchange. A stable monetary economy requires a stable and reliable coinage and this is very difficult to ensure. Counterfeiters and clippers of coins will sow distrust and destabilise the whole system if left unchecked. Even if one accepts only gold coins there is no guarantee of a fixed currency as the supply of and demand for gold can fluctuate like that of any other commodity. The only thing that can ensure stable currency is a strong and stable mint, backed by political, economic and even military authority if needed. Strong government is needed.

Where good coin is traded along with bad, riots and revolutions will ensue. The temptation will be great to accept only good coin as payment for one’s goods or services while paying one’s own debts in bad. Even governments can be tempted and the history of China, for example, tells of revolutions triggered by authorities who collected taxes in good coinage but paid out only bad and this sort of thing still goes on in the more volatile sectors of our global economy to the great dismay of the World Bank and other would-be guarantors of economic order. Until quite recently it was common for contracts to state explicitly that the buyer had examined the money being offered in payment and had found it to his satisfaction. In our time, many prefer dollars or euros over their own local currency though even dollars and euros fluctuate so there really is no end to the trouble.

Money has no History

When faced with such perplexities we can frequently find guidance in utopian writing or foundation myths, comparing for edification our own fallen state with that of an Arcadian past or a noble vision of how things should be appointed. While some writers of such texts address the problem of money, none offer a workable solution other than leaving its management up to divine guidance or such just and even-handed rulers as we have all despaired of ever finding. Indeed, Raphael Hythloday, the fictional narrator of Thomas More’s Utopia, simply states his opinion that no nation can be governed justly or happily so long as there be property or money in it. The solution in most cases has been to do away with need and money altogether as Hesiod did in the seventh century B.C. when describing the Golden Age. The inhabitants needed for nothing: “All goods were theirs. The fruitful grainland yielded its harvest to them of its own accord.” In the absence of such self-harvesting plenty, the only plausible proposals to do away with money outline a society that to a modern mind looks much like the hand-to-mouth struggle of hunting and gathering.

There never was a monetary Garden of Eden, no Arcady where all were flush with coin and no one was ever short-changed or cheated of his interest. The origin of money is lost in the mists of passed time. Indeed, we have no assurance of the tenability of any such origin as the history of money records only changes, developments and fluctuations – never beginnings – and even the earliest literature speaks of money with an air of sophistication that indicates long and merry acquaintance. People have been doing clever things with money since long before there was science or philosophy or historical writing. In fact, most of the early writings we have found were written by accountants and they already knew about accounting before they figured out how to write it down. Money has no historical beginning and to assume one is an unwarranted presumption, to attempt to tell it as a story is sheer mythomania. For practical purposes it is probably easiest to assume that money has always been with us and that it has always troubled us. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, otherwise so optimistic, could think of no era “when the times were not hard and money not scarce”.

Money is the Measure of All Things

The point of money is not to talk or theorise about it but to make it, count it up, and spend it in such a way that you end up making more money back than you had in the first place. That is called investing and it’s a wise thing to do and it doesn’t take a philosopher to tell you so ... any banker will explain the essential principles if you give him a chance. We can easily admire a wealthy person despite any intellectual shortcomings. In fact we like our rich to be dumb. There is something very sinister about a rich man who is also clever and the combination is used to characterise villains in our literature: James Bond did battle with a good many of them.

Philosophers, by contrast, have been famously inept at making money. They even seem averse to it and the only truly rich philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, gave away all his money to dedicate himself to the contemplative life. The anti-money attitude comes across already with the Greeks as when Diogenes, a contemporary of Plato, said that “in a rich man’s house the only place to spit is in his face”. Plato himself was less direct, noting only that virtue does not come from money, something that has been amply illustrated in the subsequent history of wealth. Philosophers supposedly hanker for truth and it seems they have not seen fit to seek it in money. They tend to see money as a distastefully crude embodiment of value. Values, like colours, are not properly seen as properties of things. Values have a presence in their own right, just as a colour has without any reference to coloured things and it is, for example, senseless to ask for the common property of all blue things since all they have in common is their blueness. “The value itself always must be intuitively given,” insisted Max Scheler, one of the foremost philosophers in the field of value theory. Money therefore appears crude in that it raises claims to being a universal property whereas price is certainly not intuitively given, and it is distasteful in that it is reductive of the rich variety of our perception of values. Thus we can say of someone that he knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Assigning value to things, thoughts and events seems to muddle what we might want to think of as their natural ordering. The system of value is clearly different from and independent of any natural order in which the world arranges itself, yet value is as basic a feature of our universe as being itself. Value does not derive from being but appears of its own accord and can be apprehended as easily and as immediately as truth. Money belongs to no natural order but it has become the supreme measure and instrument of value and, perversely, will buy you not only ephemeral things but real estate and real goods of all kinds: Whatever one may need.

What one needs may vary, not least depending on what one already has. Needs can and have been classified and ranked so we acknowledge basic needs, less pressing needs and luxuries in that order of precedence. Food, drink and shelter are taken to be basic. A hungry man will be no happier though given a book to read and a man who has no shelter has no need of a dining room ensemble. Needs must be filled according to the order of precedence and in the appropriate quantities. If you have more food than you can eat, some of it will simply spoil. The having of needs and filling them reveals a world ordered by the ways in which I can incorporate things into myself, literally as when I eat to fill my stomach or more abstractly as when I fill my house with pretty and pleasing furniture.

The simplest, most basic needs set up correspondingly simple relationships with the objects around us: Edibility is their primary virtue or their usefulness in procuring edible things. With a full stomach we can then pursue more sophisticated possessions and, as we incorporate food into our body, we can incorporate these into our lives by possessing them, either for consumption or for the pleasure of having them around. The acquisition of things beyond what one strictly speaking needs at the moment is what we mean when we speak of wealth, be it modest or great. Having reserves guards against future shortfalls and ensures the continued fulfilment of our needs. The greater the reserve, the more certain one may be of the future, the more secure in one’s station, the more powerful when compared to the less fortunate who must scrounge for their daily bread. Wealth is mass and power; a wealthy man is a man of substance, a force to be reckoned with, and while the poor generally get poorer, the rich get richer. “It’s the rich wot gets the gravy,” sang the British soldiers in World War I.

The acquisition of money, particularly in large quantities, provokes mystical speculation or is at any rate the subject of superstitions. Thus the gambler refuses to acknowledge the statistical rigidity of the roulette wheel and prefers the comfort of lucky numbers, charms and winning runs. Similar attitudes predominate when people speak of great fortunes, oil strikes, stock-market successes, microchip miracles and corporate conquests. The inflexible economics of the interest rate are easily replaced by a rabbit’s foot and this attitude even extends to the rich and successful themselves. J.P. Getty was a firm believer in the mystical operations of wealth and explained in his autobiography that success did not result from merit but was merely a manifestation of the disproportionate operation of nature. This, he said, applies equally to business, art, literature, sports and, indeed, politics. “Certainly, whatever nationality, we have all seen inarticulate, clay lump clods elected to high office by landslide majorities as Nature’s perverse penchant for inequality manifested itself.”

The mysticism which this perverse penchant inspired in the billionaire was revealed when he spoke of the late Max Aitken who “once summed up all I have been seeking to express ... with a classic one-line remark. ‘You know, Paul,’ he said. ‘I’ve always felt that I had a reserved seat in life.’ Getty was much taken by his friend’s insight and it sufficed him as explanation and justification for his own pre-eminence. “Be it generated by a Power, a mysterious X-factor or merely a combination of circumstances, it does seem that some people do have reserved seats in life. If they do, it would be foolish and a needless waste for them to be guilt-ridden about it and move back and lose themselves among the standees.”

Unfortunately such optimism is not confined to the ranks of privilege and most people probably like to think that they, too, deserve to have a reserved seat in life or have, at any rate, as much right to it as anyone else. The mystical view of finance perpetuates belief in rags-to-riches stories, assuring everyone of the immanent possibility of monetary salvation. The pools, the race-track and the lottery are constant reminders of the reservation that we feel was certainly made for us, though for where or when we have never been told. Poverty is not borne lightly and never whole-heartedly accepted though the more patient may endure it on the promise of an irrevocable reservation for a seat in rent-free heaven.

How rich does one have to be to have enough? Getty was rich but as he said when asked to confirm if it was true he had a billion dollar: “I suppose so, but remember, a billion dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to.” Some rich people spend extravagantly while others hoard their wealth. Once you have become very rich there isn’t much you can reasonably do with your wealth. You may grant yourself any whim and material indulgence – drink pearls dissolved in vinegar and eat toasted lark tongues all day long as certain decadent emperors are said to have done – and yet such excess is limited by your appetite and that of your guests. You may build yourself bigger and bigger houses and buy more and more expensive things but eventually you will have more rooms than you have time to visit and more jewellery than you can possibly carry. Human capacity regretfully imposes a regulation on the hording of concrete objects. To have wealth beyond that capacity one must resort to a kind of abstraction, just as we factorize to express numbers so large that they cannot be conveniently written in full.

Money, of course, is just such an abstraction. While you cannot own more heads of cattle than can graze on your land you can own enough money to buy twice, even ten times that number of cattle. While you can only eat a pound or two of caviar in a day you can have enough money to buy a ton. With money one can have fantastic wealth, riches of fairytale dimensions. More wealth, more substance, more power than can even be expressed in real objects like heads of cattle or portions of caviar. Freed from the limits of reality, money is boundless, in its accumulation as in the spending of it. You can’t eat it all or wear it or watch proudly as it grazes in your field but you can own it and there is no limit to how much of you can own.

Money Moves Fast

Tempting as it might be, money is not to be hoarded. Money must circulate all the time for the economic equations to hold. If money stops it is no longer money. The love of money is not at all like the love of fine art or good food or good works. You shouldn’t get too attached to your money. You have to keep it moving, buying and selling as the day is long. “Joy in the sheer possession of money,” as the philosopher Georg Simmel noted, “is one of the abstract joys, one of the furthest removed from sensuous immediacy, and one of those mediated most exclusively by the process of thinking.” You can think about the millions of cows your money might buy but if you were really to buy them you would be burdened with fields crowded with of starving cows rapidly drowning in their own manure. And you would be broke.

When we see Sahihi’s sheaves of cash on their plinths in the galleries we can think of all this, of everything that money can buy, of how it corrupts even noble men, of the pain and the joy it brings. We can welcome its vigorous circulation which brings good health to our economy or we might deplore its insistent din urging us towards a harried existence where we know the price of everything but haven’t time to notice the value of anything. Money opens a gap in the system of exchange but it might as well be a black hole in our universe, ceaselessly swallowing up worlds and perhaps engendering new ones by its impenetrable logic. Looking to the heart of money we look into the abyss. In the museum we can admire all this money tamed by a more aesthetic ideal, as bundles of coloured paper arranged by shapes and colour with no apparent concern for its economic destiny. We can let ourselves be drawn by Sahihi’s subtle sense of proportion and perspective. But this money will soon be on the move again.

Money is an abstraction made concrete for a moment and then abstracted again only to become real again and then abstract, ad infinitum. Its existence is a flicker, like that of the infinitesimally small pseudo-particles that physicists are forever bringing into life in their bubble chambers, too quick to be seen yet real enough to impact the world in some way we may never fully understand. Whether we be rich or poor we are bound to that flickering moment when money exists as such, in its full glorious potential, for salvation or ruin. Money is that intermediary state between possession and deprivation which, by the way, is how Plato described love.