Junior Opus

Summary

The Visual Significance of Money: the Value of the Immaterial

The aim of this paper is to investigate the visual significance of money in the context of dematerialization when money loses its material form and becomes invisible. In this vein, currency design helps to assess the meaning of the visual, important for exchange on the symbolic level. It is crucial to divide exactly the visual as representations implied in visual narratives of currency design, and the visible as physical features of money issued during certain historical periods. Paradoxically, while the visible embodies the abstract idea of money circulating in the material world, the visual promotes ideologized images of reality, substituting reality itself. And once money becomes immaterial, the economic value becomes a pure social convention, but the value of possessing money gains phantasmatic features grounded in digitized visual imagery like, for instance, NFT artworks, while material money transcends its economic functionality and gains the value of the cultural artifact.