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Money also requires fungibility, which art certainly is not. Typically money is also supposed to be a unit of account, which both requires fungibility and unive
by village-idiot 7y ago
Money also requires fungibility, which art certainly is not. Typically money is also supposed to be a unit of account, which both requires fungibility and universality, something art doesn’t have. Nobody values their house in paintings, that’s ridiculous, instead the house and the art gallery are measured in the local currency.
I think realistically modern art is more of an investment vehicle than a currency.
- lawn 7y agoAll good points. I'll add that art is probably used for tax avoidance and money laundering as well.
- dagaci 7y agoBut remember that Fungibility is relative because digitally the movement of USD is traceable. And all physical USD are marketed with serial numbers. Money laundering is a huge part of the financial system where $100 will be sold for $50 for the purpose of obtaining "clean" money, or where vast amounts of artificial work is expended for the purpose of funnelling cash into the mainstream. Thus $100 is not always worth $100.
- village-idiot 7y agoThat’s a fair point, but even still there is a massive gap between the fungibility of USD and art. Assuming all your money is clean, there’s literally no difference between any two given dollars. High value art on the other hand is at most produced in limited editions, and a lot of the super high value stuff is literally unique.