Money

This unique 'exhibition in a book' presents some of the most challenging art to deal with the place of money in the contemporary world: here, artists engage with this most powerful of social forces and address the ways it affects our lives. All of them help us understand the world in which we live. Some artists use real money directly in their work, while others explore its more abstract aspects, such as the way it circulates. Some make expensive objects from valuable materials or produce copies of luxury goods, while others go towards the amateurish and the handmade to question the idea of 'value'. Some present art as a consumer product like any other, while there are some who produce art about the business of buying and selling, including the commodity of art itself. For others, however, art provides a means to explore and try out possibilities that might one day challenge or even replace capitalism as we know it.