Make what you will of this.

As an investment, cash is considered a conservative bet. Tonight in Melbourne, a confident buyer took a punt that sometimes, in certain company, cash is worth more as art than money in the bank.

As the opening lot of the Deutscher and Hackett auction, a single wad of $20,000 cash – an artwork called Currency – was sold for $17,500. When the 22 per cent buyer’s premium is added, the total cost comes to $21,350.

The work – by Sydney artist Denis Beaubois, and brought to life with a $20,000 grant from the Australia Council – was divided into two lots of 100 uncirculated $100 banknotes.

So, an artist is given $20,000 and he decides to rebrand the cash as art and put it out to auction where someone purchases it for $1,350 more than its cold cash value.  OK.

What I’d be interested in knowing is the mindset of both the artist and the purchaser.  The dreamer in me would like to believe that the artist was conducting a grand social experiment with the goal of finding out if  “placing [cash] within an art context will elevate the value or degrade it.”  Interesting enough although I’m not sure it would pass the Tolstoy litmus test of what can be regarded as art.  In his essay, ‘What Is Art‘, Tolstoy describes true art as one which transfers the artist’s feelings over to the viewer in a clear, purposeful manner.

Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications.

That being so, what feelings are invoked by seeing two stacks of $10,000 sitting under a glass cover and, more to the point, what emotion(s) was the artist attempting to convey?  This is where the cynic in me emerges.  It is quite possible that the only intent the Sydney artist had in mind was to garner publicity for himself…and if that is the case, he was successful.

As for the buyer, I have no idea what her/his thinking might be.  There might be some deep, emotional rationale behind the purchase or it might simply be a case of a person hoping to make a dollar by reselling the ‘art’ at a higher price.  How that might be accomplished in this case, I don’t know, but keep in mind that we’re dealing with the art world here.  Conventional patterns of thought and conduct are not always applicable.

Whatever the case, this quote from the artist sums it up nicely.

“It’s one of those things where money means different things to different people.”

Yes it does and buyers of Andy Warhol’s art understand the value of money as art only too well.  Warhol’s 1962 “200 One Dollar Bills” sold for $43.8 million in 2009.  The seller had purchased it in 1986 for $385,000.

And while we’re discussing money-as-art, take a look at this.

(Image at top of post: Deutscher and Hackett executive director Damian Hackett with Denis Beaubois’s artwork titled Currency. Picture: Sam Mooy Source: The Australian)

___

Follow MarioPiperniDotCom on Facebook and Twitter.

.