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One Currency For North America? An Artist Busts Borders, Issuing The 'Amero' At A Former Texas Bank

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At the former First National Bank of Galveston, on the Gulf Coast of Texas, Anthony Thompson Shumate is minting the next coin of the realm. Intended to circulate across the continent from Canada to Mexico, the amero may become the North American counterpart to the more-established euro. Visitors to the bank building – now the Galveston Arts Center – can freely exchange their dollars for ameros of Shumate's making.

Shumate's amero scheme, more formally titled Novus Ordo Seclorum, is just one of several monetary provocations currently on view at the Galveston Arts Center. Although they have little in common at first glance, ranging in medium from collage to electronics, the most interesting works in the exhibition challenge economic abstractions with tangible speculations.

Nobody does this more directly than Kevin Curry, who literally makes money by cutting 1/8-inch squares from dollar bills. The squares from 1,029 bills are glued together to produce a new dollar. The modest trimming of the old currency scarcely attracts notice when he puts it back in circulation.

Curry's ploy might attract copycats were it not for the fact that a single dollar can take hours to assemble. The potential earnings are below minimum wage. But while Curry presents his work as a commentary on the value of labor – ignoring how the numbers would work out were his ruse applied to Benjamins – the project is most subversive for the ways in which it questions the origins of value.

A dollar is worth a dollar on account of common agreement, which may be reinforced by institutions including banks and the US government, but which would collapse without popular consensus. Curry's project evokes how precarious this consensus is, how vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. What would happen if his process were replicated by everyone? He reveals money to be our common property and our collective responsibility.

Of course collective self-governance brings problems of its own, as many have experienced directly through the trials and tribulations of Bitcoin. A project by Mike Beradino is mired in these troubles. Back in 2012, Beradino built a mining rig dubbed Load Runner, which was intended to earn bitcoins and to invest them in gold ingots smelted from obsolete electronics. But Beradino made the mistake of placing his trust in the Mt. Gox exchange, which filed for bankruptcy following what appears to be rampant theft. Unable to buy ingots with the 27 bitcoins he mined, he was left with a rig already obsolete in its own right. The rig is now exhibited as an installation that might be considered an object lesson in the follies of cryptocurrency.

Beradino sought to bank his earnings in the byproduct of their own making: the gold from electronics driven to obsolescence by the economics of mining. It was a sort of electronic arbitrage that couldn't compete with the technological pace of cybercrime. Money generated out of nothing vanished even more quickly than it was made. Did it ever exist in the first place?

The amero does not exist, not officially at least, though there have been rumors for a long time. What began as an academic exercise in the late '90s swiftly became fodder for conspiracy theories peddled by right-wingers wanting to spread fear of a borderless continent. To Anthony Thompson Shumate, the alleged North American Union didn't seem like such a bad idea. To give people a feel for a future in which the US formed a monetary alliance with Canada and Mexico, he began preemptively issuing currency and coins back in 2009.

He isn't the first to have done it. The US coin designer Daniel Carr created a private-issue fantasy pattern back in 2007. But the pointedly political iconography Shumate chose, and his ongoing pursuit of the project in the current political context, give it a resonance that Carr never achieved or intended. In 2019, the euro is threatened by the European right wing, and the Trump administration plans to build a wall on the Mexican border. The fear-mongers appear to have had their way with public opinion, rendering the amero conspiracy as obsolete as an old bitcoin rig. Shumate's work stands out for his brave attempt to reframe the amero as a sociopolitical opportunity.

Can we overcome bigotry and create a new commons with shared currency? The situation in Europe remains undecided. But Shumate is not out lobbying heads of state. His currency is art. The value of his coinage, freed from the everyday duties of cash, is to be found in the exchange of ideas.

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