Coin Links
Links to numismatic sites.
| |
|
Coin Books -> Numismatic
Boggs: A Comedy of Values (Passions and Wonders Series)
 |
by:
Weschler, Lawrence
|
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Published: May 1999
ISBN: 0226893952
Format:Hardcover
Pages:160
|
Read More, Buy It
|
Book Description
Amazon.com
James Stephen George Boggs is not a con artist, he's a talented artist who deftly renders his own currency and "spends" it. Struck by the value of money, and what paper notes represent, he draws U.S. dollar bills, English pound notes, Swiss
francs, and other forms of paper money; then he barters his illustrious artwork in lieu of cash to willing merchants who agree to honor his currency for services and products. In Boggs: A Comedy of Values, Lawrence Weschler, author of the Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, documents Boggs's whimsical antics, offering a quirky and lively meditation on the value of currency and workmanship and a richly informative (albeit brief) social
history of money.
Boggs does not sell his "money" directly, as Weschler learns, nor does he attempt to pass his drawings off as actual bills. For Boggs, the elaborate transaction of negotiation is a crucial element in his work, and the tangible proof
of his success--receipts and proper change--is included in the final product. Of course, treasury departments from around the world are anything but pleased; the second half of the book deals extensively with the artist's court battle with the Bank of
England. As Weschler notes, Boggs is not the first to question the value of money through art (Larry Rivers, Pablo Picasso, Timm Ulrichs, Adolf Wölfi, and Jurgen Harten are just some artists who have put currency to the test), but the author finds
in Boggs's work an ideal subject for opening a probing inquiry into the economy of money, especially timely at the end of the 20th century as paper currency--which once directly represented precious-metal coins--evolves into "binary sequences of pulses
racing between computers." --Kera Bolonik
The Atlantic Monthly, Toby Lester
...the book, like the artist, challenges people to pause and consider the extent to which the economic bedrock of everyday life is in part a confusing welter of artistic
abstractions. It's a work that is at once informative, entertaining, and provocative--a reading experience, one might say, of rather good value.
Read More, Buy It
|
|
