A DEFENSE OF BRAD TROEMEL'S EBAY ART PROJECT

Last week, I republished comments from artist Brad Troemel taken from an online exhibit of his work, which included this description of how he'd altered copies of colonial coins:

While I felt Troemel's work overall was "legitimate and fully within the theme of modern money artists," I had trouble with his removal of the word "COPY", which is illegal to do to copies offered for resale (at least, that's my understanding of the Hobby Protection Act). I wrote:

Taking money like a crook...? I'm not sure about the implications of ethics and criminality here. Would you blame a collector for showing some pride in a coin that he or she purchased at a bargain price from a seller who had less idea of its actual market worth? Profiting from this kind of exchange is surely one of the celebrated pleasures of collecting. The question of propriety doesn't enter into this equation: after all, isn't this an accepted part of dealing in a free-market?

If one reverses the respective advantages enjoyed by buyer and seller in the scenario above, then you have the basis of Brad Troemel's eBay project which I see as operating squarely (if somewhat cynically) within the commercial realm of collecting. Whether or not it is appropriate to label either case as 'dishonest' depends on how technical you want to get about the rights and obligations attached to appraisal (how many collectors would admit their knowledge to the seller and then offer something comparable to its market value?)

Troemel's efforts at defacement don't seem to me to have anything to do with the practice of collecting for the love of the object. I could be wrong but I doubt that these "barely legible" coins would have attracted the interest of serious collectors. Their appeal was rather to those who imagined they could turn a profit on someone else's guilelessness. Having been on the receiving end, I take no joy in the idea of an individual being cheated, however I can appreciate a sort of comedy in someone being tempted into spending money to purchase money while gambling on the chance that they'll make even more money from the exchange.

And remember that we're not talking about the sort of money people would pay if they were under the false impression they'd be getting a specific coin. Troemel's work was nothing like eBay fraudulence in the way that might rightly offend many of your readers. He didn't deceive by pretending to offer something particular - he did the opposite. By erasing the features of the coins, he created an empty space - a 'blank' - which was filled by the speculative imaginings of buyers. The artist himself has described how he fuelled these imaginings with a story about a mobster's counterfeiting operation: "My collectors were buying into a story and were receiving coins in exchange."

My feeling is that if you accept the work of any artist as legitimate, then you've committed yourself to giving serious (and critical) consideration to a lifetime of research. This might be difficult when the artist is young, hip and unashamedly provocative. Flashes of irreverent brilliance are the prerogative of artists in their youth and result in things that are often only appreciated after maturity puts a check on reckless experimentation. Troemel may be a challenge, but it would be wise not to dismiss the work as a criminal act and thus take the part of a fusty custodian against the delinquent.

There are, as you observe, other legitimate artists like J.S.G. Boggs whose fascination with money's reproduction brings them close to the edge of legality. In fact what makes their work so interesting is the fact they deal with the monetary object as an visual embodiment of legal obligations and prohibitions that is ambiguously the property of both the individual and of the State. The inevitable consequence is that the individual artist risks prosecution by working with something whose reproduction is protected by law.

Artists such as the post-war Japanese Genpei Akasegawa or the American tromp l'oeil painter, Otis Kaye, maintained an allegiance to their subject of their research even when the full and oppressive weight of the law was brought against them. For Otis Kaye, this meant he was not allowed to sell a single painting during his lifetime, although posthumously his work became part of the art collection of the Federal Reserve!

The work of J.S.G. Boggs (who, incidentally, had quite a lot to tell magistrates throughout his career) is relatively less troublesome than Troemel's because it has a more palatable relationship to the way art functions in the marketplace. It generates capital on the basis of what he (re)produces as original drawings: a handiwork we tend naturally to associate with fine art's more genteel traditions.

Brad Troemel, on the other hand, applied a different method of reproduction - one that makes his work no less 'art'. He used the age-old counterfeiter's technique of alteration but instead of 'raising' a token's nominal value, he generated capital by blurring it. The action is doubly irreverent and disrespectful because at the same time as defacing money, his amateur chemistry produced its imitation (two technical illegalities). He erased signs that identified the coin as an "authorised" reproduction and thus created a mischievous confusion. Of course he knew that much of how we value money (as currency and as artefact) depends on maintaining a clear distinction between the original and the copy - even though, as he observes in his essay, the free market already complicates this distinction by prizing counterfeits themselves as 'original' objects. (Note that his 'mobster' coins are already pretending to be counterfeits).

What I've described above might simply represent different approaches of artists to the same general topic: the mystery of how money conjures value from appearances. Given that art is a profession that has traditionally created wealth from artifice and reproduction it's not surprising that some artists exercise a reckless fascination with process of printed money's self-certification. Such a recklessness in Troemel's approach (at least in the case of his eBay project) might understandably make a numismatic collector uncomfortable, but even if you find its methodology questionable, please don't mistake his work - as ostentatious, conspicuous and temporal as it is - with commercial scams that are banal, anonymous and persistent.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: MONEY ARTIST BRAD TROEMEL EXHIBITION (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n06a29.html)

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