The first thing from this week’s lecture that I thought was interesting was the discussion about markets and economies, and the case on Paul Glover’s Ithaca Dollar. I decided to do more research on this intersection between money and art, because I felt that these two industries rarely overlapped. I discovered a very cool project: James Charles’ drawings on money. Charles’ portraits, which are created on actual money, turn dead presidents into colorfully amusing pop culture icons. For example, he’ll take Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Hamilton, and change them into Ronald McDonald, Justin Beiber, and Vincent Van Gogh. A key factor in this project is that all of the drawings are done on actual dollar bills, as his main point is to question the ultimate value of currency. We as a society place so much value and power on money, but Charles is trying to prove that this money is little more than paper and ink, begging the question, how much are these worth? Thus, while Glover was correlating money to labor, Charles was correlating money to value, and showing that if something can be masked and changed so easily, how valuable is it in reality?
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