The GOOD 100: Jonathon Keats
- Posted by: GOOD
- on October 13, 2009 at 6:00 am
Antimatters of the Art
Jonathon Keats is an artist-philosopher whose conceptual projects have examined everything from the nature of the divine (he tried to engineer God in a petri dish) to the sexuality of plants (he built a pornography theater for them). While Keats’s projects are often both whimsical and beautiful on the outside, at their center are deep questions about the nature of life and the universe. In short, it is conceptual art that actually makes you think about concepts, rather than merely about conceptual art.
His latest piece is the First Bank of Antimatter, a financial institution that will issue a new currency backed not by gold or silver, but by antimatter, in the form of positrons created from the radioactive decay of a block of potassium fluoride. “We’ve confused money, which essentially is a means of transaction, with what is transacted,” says Keats. “Therefore, we have come to place value on money on its own right as if it were one of the things transacted.” The positrons that back the bank’s currency are annihilated when they come into contact with matter, and can only exist in the material world for an instant except under controlled conditions. Since the money could never actually be exchanged for the thing that gives it value, positron notes help to distinguish between our mode of currency and the things we buy with that currency (the blurring of that line led to many of our current financial woes). “It can only really be used for purposes of transaction,” he says. “Think of it as something to be hoarded or think of it as something that is valuable in its own right, and—by the laws of nature—antimatter will refute this idea.”
The First Bank of Antimatter will offer notes in 10,000, 100,000, and 1 million positron denominations, at an initial exchange rate of $10 for 10,000 positrons, starting November 12 at the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.
DISCUSSION: 2 Comments
Intersting concept but I’m not sure it makes as strong a point as it seems to at first. The money we use here in the US and in a lot of other countries is what is known as “fiat” money, meaning it isn’t backed by anything. If you went to the federal reserve to turn in your dollars all they would give you would be… another dollar. So our money is esentially already backed by antimatter. I can understand wanting to say something about people who see money itself as a possession instead of what it is, a proxy for gaining possessions I’m just not sure the metaphor being created here is that appropriate.A more interesting point might be to poke a hole in the balloon of those who want to go back to the gold standard or who are buying gold bars to hide under their bed. Last I checked, gold had no inherient value either. You can’t eat it, drink it, build shelter out of it, etc… It has some uses in chemistry and medicine and obviously for jewelry but besides that it doesn’t do much of anything.
In the case of gold its rarity is what gives it value – there is a limited supply of it and people tend to want whatever happens to be rare.