I was recently informed of this very cool project that is sweeping the globe! Art as money. Buy your money, spend your art. We do indeed need a whole different way of looking at money, it is a tool that we can use as we please, not something to be controlled by. I find this a very liberating project, freeing your mind up to look at wealth from a completely different angle. In fact, I have just been reading Robert Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising and would like to pass on some of his comments about wealth, which relate directly to this topic:

The real source of wealth is correct ideas: workable ideas: that is negative entropy — Information.

The origin of these coherent (workable) ideas is the human nervous system. All wealth is created by human beings using their neurons intelligently.

Look at a human community; you are seeing the historical human mind manifesting itself.

All ideas are not equally good, of course.

That is why John Ruskin, a century ago, tried to introduce a distinction between wealth and illth. This distinction did not become accepted and incorporated into our language because people at the time, were not ready for it.

Wealth in Ruskin’s sense, consists of all the artifacts which enhance human life. Illth consists of those artifacts that destroy, demean or degrade life. A factory that pollutes the air or water is illth in this sense; so is a bomb, a sword, a pistol, a tank of nerve gas.

Since the Age of Reason in the 18th Century, the exponential increase in wealth (life-enhancing ideas manifesting) has led to more and more Utopian yearnings. At the same time, the equal and opposite increase in illth has led to more and more dystopian and apocalyptical fears.

An over-view of evolution shows beyond a doubt that wealth-producing faculty (the search for higher coherence) is the deciding factor. The illth-producing faculty is an archaic mammalian survival system rapidly becoming obsolete. p 90-94 Robert Anton Wilson

It seems to me that the Art-as-Money-blog is exploring this concept of wealth as ideas, generated from conscious, sensitive and curious humans. The blog is a place to tease out the connections and frictions between money and art. Where do those two worlds meet? Where do they clash? Or is it actually one big world with various perspectives?

The blog covers the full spectrum; from fine art, which uses money purely as its subject, all the way to money, which uses art merely as a vehicle to generate even more money. The blog encourages your active involvement through comments, submissions, guest blog posts and art.

The blog is part of the Exchanghibition Bank and Pool of Plenty project.

Trailer for the Exchanghibition Bank project: