Specimen Only

The Cultural Role of Currency

In 1815 an antecedent of mine, the Duke of Wellington, sought to decorate each participant of his campaign against the French at Waterloo. Four years later, the British Government commissioned Benedetto Pistrucci, an Italian sculptor, to create the Waterloo Medal. Having previously crafted the dramatic Saint George and the Dragon that adorns the Sovereign, the government considered the task safe in Pistrucci’s hands. Alas ill-health and feet-dragging set him back: it took him thirty years to complete. By the time the medal was finally awarded, many veterans had died. 

It is a measure of the cultural significance of numismatics that their creators are recognised: This year the Royal Mint struck £2 coins in honour of diarist Samuel Pepys, designed by letterer Gary Breeze. Prior to that, Jody Clark won the competition to redesign the Queen’s head, while Matthew Dent designed the fragmented coat-of-arms that scatters itself across Britain’s loose-change. Here is a sector as fertile as car design, and where artistic appreciation is similarly challenged by ubiquity.

There is a certain pride in peeling away a pristine note, unfolded, from a breast-pocket wallet. In ‘The Man With The Golden Gun’, Ian Fleming places M. at his club, Blades, sending for the bill for his ‘meagre luncheon’: ‘As usual he paid, whatever the amount of the bill, with a five-pound note for the pleasure of receiving in change crisp new pound notes, new silver and gleaming copper pennies, for it is the custom at Blades to give its members only freshly minted money.’

Perversely for a medium that has caused such inequality, numismatics is also one of the most wide-reaching of art-forms. A back-of-envelope calculation suggests the surface area of all currency in circulation worldwide is 10,000km2 -about half the size of Wales. The Bayeux Tapestry, by comparison, is a mere 35m2, some 280 million times smaller. As a pictorial historical record, there is no greater canvas than currency. The minute painstaking scrapes from the engraver’s burin endows coins and notes with value beyond their denomination, becoming a chapter of patriotic self-projection. They become ambassadors for countries and witnesses to their histories. Figures such as Sir Isaac Newton and Florence Nightingale have courted countless transactions in England; the bald eagle an omnipresent promise of power and liberty in North America.

After the Euro entered currency in 2001, French economist André Orléan criticised the disconnect between the money and the nation-states ”Look at the symbolism: bridges and imaginary windows. The euro isn't anchored in the past, it's virtual, it doesn't correspond to any reality.” It seems prescient that the currency could not find any commonality to represent, instead falling between every stool to symbolise only the paradox between political will of integration and the detachment of MEPs.

If Euro coins and notes suggest culturally anaemia, digital transactions present an even greater dilution of aesthetic and national symbolism. At the Fintech Design summit, the second of which occurred this month in London, UI designers and financial start-ups discuss the development of insurance comparison sites and banking apps. It is a landscape where customer value is not just in pricing but convenience -surely the new measure of worth in a digital world. But for all the swipe-count reductions between transactions, it is aesthetically a sea of Arial. All that value and creativity has become enshrined in a generic typeface. Denominations have found a single common-denominator.

As coding replaces illustrative intricacy and water-marks as the measure of security, so the UI design of apps is left to focus on ease-of-use and legibility. For the richest and most culturally interwoven of art-forms, hidden lines of code seem a poor substitute. That Apple has announced a credit card made from titanium seems a tacit acknowledgment that money has worth beyond face-value, and is not merely a conduit for transactions.