From Manet’s single asparagus painted for a 200-franc overpayment to Duchamp’s Teeth's Loan & Trust check drawn for his dentist, the potential equivalence of art and money has been postulated as both generative and problematic. This one-day symposium considers intersections of the artistic and monetary worlds, examining the mutual concern for consumption, valuation, circulation, materiality, authenticity, and imitation that emerged from both artistic and economic spheres. In what ways are aesthetic and monetary values related? How have economic and artistic circulations mirrored one another historically? How have artists given pictorial form to speculation, credits, and other abstract forms of monetary exchange? Conversely, how have aesthetic concerns or artistic projects informed or driven economic thinking? How have the aesthetic concerns of finance evolved with shifts from metallic to paper to electronic currencies? In what ways has the material culture of money intersected or overlapped with artistic practice?

Part of the international conference series Economic Thought and the Work of Art:
London: Tate, January 22, 2016 – Invisible Hands: Markets and the Making of American Art
New York: Columbia University, May 13, 2016 ­– Art and the Monetary
Paris: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2016-17 – TBD