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History of Paper Money: Series Art
🕑 Added 2016-11-07 19:13:05 +0000 UTC Over the course of this series, we have asked time after time: just what is money? Artist Lil Chan channels Magritte in asking us to re-evaluate our perceptions.P.S. Can you figure out what's written in binary code around the coin? Or what the plant on the coin represents? Or the additional play on words (in French)?
P.P.S. Adding another hint to make things more Fair and help those Sage folks with a True Love of riddles, who are still trying to figure out the plant reference: these are the leaves of an herb. A very common herb, but no, it's not Parsley, it's...
P.P.S. THYME! All of the riddles have now been deciphered, so let's share them here. Much love to our commenters who worked on untangling this one!
1) The Treachery of Images - René Magritte, the famous surrealist, once painted a pipe and wrote beneath it (in French) "This is not a pipe." As he explained it, it was just a picture of a pipe - it couldn't do any pipe things, so it wasn't really a pipe, was it? This series art directly references that famous painting. Like the pipe, this picture of a gold coin can't do any of the things money does (it's just a picture!) but here the phrase "This is not money" also references of John Law's idea that money like gold coins are a means of exchange whose value lies in our willingness to trade them. In itself, without our willingness to consider it valuable, it is not necessarily "money."
2) Ce n'est pas l'argent - Setting aside our questionable French grammar :(, "argent" in French means money... but it also means "silver." This gold coin is making the joke that not only is it not money, it is also (quite literally) not silver.
3) 1s and 0s - The French text says that "this is not money," yet the binary code around the coin reads "But aren't I?" We like the coin's sass, but we also thought it would be fun to slip this in as a little reference to digital cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (even though we are not discussing them directly in this series).
4) Thyme is Money - Those leaves on the coin are thyme, and as the English proverb says, "Time is money!" Once again, the question of what money really means to us may be more complicated than we think... or maybe this particular coin is just a incorrigible jokester.
Comments
Simon Loyer
I love your work so much. And I'm sorry to say this, but like some other French here, this is killing me. "Ceci n'est pas de l'argent" "Ce n'est pas de l'argent" Both are acceptable but not the one here.
Extra History
YES! You got it. :D And the deep web of references is one of the things I really love about it.
Pavel Yakushevich
Well, this is easy now. Thyme is money. Also, this artwork has its postmodernism meter cranked to 11. Every element is a reference to one or more of preceding works of art in a different context.
Andreas "Rowas" Lind-Sahlin
=D I would have loved to see the use of the binary for a capital B and capital I, but that's just me nitpicking. :p
Extra History
10 points to Gryffindor! Thyme is indeed the correct plant. Now, as to its significance on this particular coin, that I'll leave you to ponder further...
Nessf
Remember me to one who lived there...
eLNeroDiablo Studios
Thyme! #"Are you going to Scarborough Fair?"# :3
Martin Verran
In that case I can reveal to you, again via Google Language Tools, that "Ce n'est pas l'argent" Translates in English as, "It's not Money."
Extra History
Adding another hint to make things more Fair and help those Sage folks with a True Love of riddles, who are still trying to figure out the plant reference: these are the leaves of an herb. A very common herb, but no, it's not Parsley, it's...
Extra History
You got the binary perfectly! Explanation for the French pun is in the comments above. :D
Extra History
It's argent, with an R. ;D
Extra History
You're thinking along the right lines! Those are the leaves... of a certain herb that's been around forever, you might say.
Martin Verran
"Ce n'est pas l'angent" Translates as "This is not the Angent," according to the oh-so-reliable Google Language Tools, but then again it could be wrong.
Matt Lakits doesn't have the mental energy to update their Patreon name anymore, but still listens to every episode avidly!
The author is indeed dead, and so is the horse I am going to beat, adding my two cents to this debate: I'd say "Ceci n'est pas de l'argent" would have more closely referenced Magritte's original ("ceci n'est pas une pipe"), but previous commenters are right to say "de l'argent" can't refer to money as a concept, only the silver metal or actual currency. Trouble is, saying "ceci n'est pas l'argent", without the "de", only refers to money as concept, not the metal (grammaticaly you need a partitive there, and in French we always need "de" to express the partitive: "de l'argent, de l'or, du pain, de l'eau"). And back to Magritte, his pun is even more untranslatable, as "une pipe" in French also means oral sex...
eLNeroDiablo Studios
The plant... "If money grew on trees, it'd be as valuable as leaves." (aka: worthless due to abundance and lack of scarcity)...
schuyler
"I do not have the means to waste my time making money" Louis Agassiz.
Andreas "Rowas" Lind-Sahlin
The binary reads 'but aren't i'. So I'm guessing that plays into the pun on the french text that that it both is and isn't money :p
Alain Park Suk S.
As a french, I'd say "Ce n'est pas de l'argent" is the correct sentence. The pun work and is more understandable for french thant the original one.
Extra History
Not cottonwood, but it is in some ways a play on the substance of money. Not in terms of what makes it up though... More like a synonym from a certain English proverb.
Extra History
...Although apparently (suivi Thomas) this is a complicated question that I will let those who remember their French grammar better than I do discuss further. ;) For what it's worth, I actually was going for "ce" instead of "ceci" as being the concept of money (rather than this specific instance of money) and I thought I remembered something about "pas + de" meaning "not a part of the whole" whereas I meant "this is not money at all." So I did put a lot of thought into being wrong, and at this point, perhaps we can just accept Barthes's conclusion that the author is dead and whatever koan meanings you derive from this grammar are yours to own and reflect upon. ;)
Thomas Yann Buick
So the right mistake to make i feel (I'll betray my french teachers on this one ^^)
Extra History
Yeah, that's my bad! My French is super rusty, so when Lil asked me for confirmation here I merely led her astray. The pun was intentional, though, and you did nail that explanation! -Soraya
Extra History
It's both! Jose explains this well below.
Extra History
Not tulips!
Thomas Yann Buick
I had the same reflex, and initially thought that "Ceci n'est pas de l'argent" was more correct, and certainly more idiomatic. But "Ceci" Is too specific, (translate as this), what is meant to be expressed isn't so much the Treachery of a Specific Images, But the treachery of currency as a concept. "Ce n'est pas DE l'argent" remains again more idiomatically correct, but if you really think about it , adding "de" makes the conversation only about physical currency or silver the substance, putting aside a bit money as a concept. Dropping the "de" certainly adds a "koan" feel to the sentence, yes less correct day to day, but slightly more thought provoking, in the sense that money is an agreed upon illusion.
Thomas Yann Buick
Is the plant supposed to be a cottonwood branch, to have a further play on the "substance" of money? Since most "Paper" currencies are mostly cotton.
Jose Beltran Escavy
It is both "this is not silver" and "this is not money". "Argent", in French, means both "silver" and "money". Quite a clever pune, or play on words! (Terry Pratchett dixit). Although I think that a more correct French text would be "Ceci n'est pas de l'argent". As written, "Ce n'est pas l'argent" would tend to mean something like "It is not the money" (implying that "the money is not the thing that does X")
TalonsofWater
I initially thought it was "This is not silver". But it's "This is not money". As for the binary code. I can't read binary, so I can't figure that one out.
Curt Barker
Are they tulips? Referencing the Dutch Tulip crisis and the hyperinflation that resulted?
Extra History
Nope, afraid that's not it!
Pavel Yakushevich
The laurel on the coin, it's made of lily flowers, isn't it?
Extra History
You got it!
Antti Björklund
Silver is what I first thought of, since the latin for silver is argentum (incidentally that's where Argentine's name comes from).
Andre Laferriere
Is the play on word for French on argent meaning money and silver at the same time? Thus "ce n'est pas de l'argent" applies at it looks like gold and is not silver...
Nessf
My high school french fails me! Ah well, over to someone else.
Extra History
As someone who loves Magritte, I am happy every time someone references him!
Extra History
You got the binary perfectly! The French, though, has a play on words that goes a bit further than the Magritte reference.
Nessf
The french writing is a reference to "The Treachery of Images", 'C'est ne pas un pipe'. Literally, your version is 'This is not money'. The binary seems to disagree, since the message encoded in it asks "But aren't I?" (the question mark and capitals I took the liberty of adding) The plants, there I'll admit I'm stumped.
Trevor Sullivan
What a coincidence, I'm using the "Ce n'est pas ..." thing for a linguistics conference my school is hosting next month :P
