FILTHY Money
We know how much things cost, but no idea what things are really worth. What is value? What is valuable? How are we deciding, and who is the we that’s deciding? There’s this endless layer of proxies of proxies of proxies. How many layers do we have to drill down through before we get to something real?
I don’t have a clean answer. I’m honestly not sure any of this is different from the creator / patron / vendor relationships we’ve always had. But I think it’s worth asking the questions out loud — and this project was my way of asking them.
The paper was free
One of the biggest costs in any letterpress project is the paper. So I found some free paper — at the bank. We don’t think of cash as being “free,” because it has value. But we don’t buy it. And when I’d finished printing “FILTHY” across 110 sheets of high-quality paper, I had the same amount of money I’d had beforehand.
So what was the difference between the $1 FILTHY and the $100 FILTHY? The art is the same — almost identical, printed with the same ink, the same wood type, on the same Vandercook letterpress, in the same print run. And what about the value of these “prints”? Is there a value to assign to the ink? Is it the idea? Can any of it be line-itemed?
It still spends
After printing my money, I took a trip and used the cash for purchases along the way. I went to New York City, spent some in Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland. People who heard about the project wanted to collect it, and some suggested I sell each bill for some amount plus the face value on the bill. In the end I traded the cash for equal value bills and asked people to spend it. I wanted it to be recirculated.
As I spent it, the reaction was mixed. Some people refused to take it, feeling it was now marred and worthless. Others asked for additional bills, declaring their intention to frame it.
So what? Does the art layer add value, or take it away?
Regardless, almost everyone paused. They looked at it, felt the ink with a thumb, flipped it over, inspected it. They thought about it. They asked questions. They considered it. And that is really all I wanted.
It’s been a few years now, and I’ve spent most of the cash. Unfortunately (*ahem* not surprisingly), I’ve yet to hear whether anyone ever got a FILTHY bill back as change.
Here’s a peek at each of the printed bills...
Heres a peek at
What it was really about
We can’t touch value. We can’t flip it over in our hands, hold it up to the light, fold it, and stash it in a wallet. FILTHY Money made value physical for a moment — something you could feel the ink of and hand across a bar — precisely so we’d stop and question it. That was the whole point. I just wanted us to talk about it.
