Re-posted from \u201cConsidering Money Stuff\u201d on Socializing Finance.<\/a><\/p>\n Money is the most commonly circulating art form. At the same time, payment objects are unstable and excessive, frequently transforming their status from money to trash to art (and back again). Argentinian artist, M\u00e1ximo Gonz\u00e1lez<\/a>\u2014who I write about\u2014weaves out-of-print Mexican pesos and discarded scraps of currency into fabrics like The World\u2019s Garbage (2012) and creates collages from out-of-circulation currency into Landscapes with Landfill (2003, 2005) transforming the trash of cash into art (potentially convertible to cash).<\/p>\n M\u00e1ximo Gonz\u00e1lez \u201cBasural sin paisaje # 8,\u201d 2015<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Through our repeated handling, however, the art of money stuff becomes unremarkable. U.S. dollars\u2014through their uniform color and dimensions\u2014appear particularly adept at fading into the background. By curating payment objects in Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff<\/em><\/a>, Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz take these things out of circulation. Each of the chapters sets a particular type of \u201cmoney stuff\u201d aside and asks the reader to take a moment with it. The chapters reveal the personal stories, history, memories, and beauty bundled up in diverse objects of payment. We, the readers, must pause to consider the complex ways in which we keep track, tally, make jokes, create art, and remember through objects of payment.<\/p>\n Money stuff also inspires art. While Square may have killed the signature\u2014how can we take our finger-painted \u201csignatures\u201d seriously?\u2014it also gave birth to electronic signature art. When asked for their e-signature, artists, as Bill Maurer relays, instead draw scenes such as \u201cthe sun setting a house on fire and people running away and one guy on fire.\u201d Not only are these \u201csignatures\u201d accepted by merchants, but also collected in \u2018zines devoted to this new art form. More than 250 years prior, Benjamin Franklin pressed foliage\u2014raspberry leaves, fern fronds\u2014into the printing press to prevent the counterfeiting of bills. Printing from nature\u2014as beautiful and seemingly whimsical as it is hard to replicate\u2014\u2014Whitney Trettien suggests, \u201cauthenticated the strange materiality of money\u201d (2017:163).<\/p>\n Inspired by Maurer\u2019s and Swartz\u2019 remarkable work editing Paid<\/em> as if curating an imaginary exhibition of money stuff, I ask what the possibilities for curation are within scholarship. To mark the publication of Paid, I have experimented as a collaborative scholar-selector by curating an unofficial soundtrack to the book. I asked chapter writers to send their favorite songs about money to mix with my own. The playlist explores some of the ways in which payment is represented and debated in different genres, time periods, and places. From Horace Andy\u2019s dubby repetition of \u201cMoney, money, money is the root of all evil,\u201d to Wu-Tang Clan\u2019s \u201cCash Rules Everything Around Me,\u201d money stuff inspires music. Not only that, but money\u2014as the sampled clink of coins or whir of bills being counted\u2014becomes music.![\"Gonza\u0301lez-Garbage\"](\"https:\/\/soundethnography.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/gonzacc81lez-garbage.jpeg?w=640\")
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