The Art of Money

“Recent decades of financialisation have seen a significant growth in art that mobilises various forms of money as artistic media. These range from the integration of material money (coins, bills, credit cards) into aesthetic processes, such as sculpture, painting, performance, and so on, to a preoccupation with more ephemeral thematics including debt, economics, and the dynamics of the art market. This article explores three (and a half) strategies that artists use to engage with money: crass opportunism; a stark revelation of money’s power; a coy play with art’s subjugation to money; and a more profound attempt to reveal the shared labour at the heart of both money and art’s aesthetic-political power. Money’s perennial appeal to artists stems from the irony of its tantalising capacity to almost represent capitalist totality. At their core, both money and art are animated by a certain creative labour, a suspension of disbelief, and a politics of representation. Artistic practices that use money can provide critical resources for studying, understanding, and seeing beyond the rule of speculative capital.” (Haiven, 2015)

While this article may not directly mention online banking apps or the financial goals that people are saving towards, it does provide interesting commentary on how artists think about money and how finance shapes aspects of our lives. In the article it describes how money is not just simply something used to buy something, but it is something that creates power and creates meaning. Haiven shows how certain artists use money in their work to show it connects to other aspects of life, to display the power that money really has. There is a relationship between how artists use and value money and how banking apps do it as well. Just as artists are able to critique or empower systems, banking apps are able to do the same by either giving users the ability to take control of their financial situations or stay within an existing system.

References:

Haiven, M. (2015). Art and Money: Three Aesthetic Strategies in an Age of Financialisation. Finance & Society, 1(1), 38–60. https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v1i1.1370

Ai was not used in the creation of this article