MORE ON ARGENTINE ARTIST PAINTING ON BANK NOTES

 

A jaguar lies beside George Washington. The United States' first president holds a rifle with one hand as he rests the other on the dead Argentine predator.

The backdrop is a U.S. dollar and an Argentine 500-peso note joined like a book, a clear allusion to the rapid depreciation of the local currency, the peso. That has made it difficult for Argentines to make ends meet. The peso has depreciated around 60% compared to the U.S. dollar over the past year. It has occurred in parallel to one of the world's highest inflation rates.

As millions of Argentines express dismay and anger, a group of artists is seeking to show the economic damage the best way they know how, with art. And as they express themselves, the artwork increases the value of the increasingly worthless bills they use as material.

Artist Sergio Díaz and other Argentine artists' Money Art movement uses moderately priced brushes and acrylics to paint banknotes of 10, 20, 100, or 1,000 pesos and then share their work on social media.

The artwork then fetches prices ranging from 40,000 to 70,000 pesos domestically and as much as $300 abroad. Stringent capital controls in Argentina mean that access to the official foreign exchange market is extremely limited, so parallel rates have flourished.

 

The artists are reclaiming the currency at a time when the bills have often been the target of disdain from Argentina's neighbors. Brazilian soccer fans have torn up peso bills as a mockery to their Argentine rivals. In Paraguay, exchange offices have begun to reject Argentine pesos.

Diaz will exhibit the piece in which Washington is shown with the jaguar, along with others from the series, The Art of Devaluation, in November in Salta, his hometown in northern Argentina.

There is an element of transgression, of vandalism... but my idea is to go beyond that and transform the bills while addressing the issue of inflation that affects us all, explained Diaz.

To read the complete article, see:
Paintings on pesos illustrate Argentina's currency and inflation woes (https://apnews.com/article/argentina-money-art-inflation-bills-69a505d4f72c440a4bdd2e756e2d2d38)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
ARGENTINE ARTIST PAINTS ON BANK NOTES (https://www.coinbooks.org/v26/esylum_v26n02a29.html)

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