tulips to crypto (cash fetish)
bags, shoes, bins, & bits of money
Commodities that had intrinsic value like grain, livestock, salt (Roman Empire), shells (Africa and Asia), and raw gold were the earliest form of money, used about 5000 years ago. Coins were first minted about 2500 years after that (in what is now Turkey) and made of electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold.
A few hundred years after that China invented paper money, (around the same time as moveable type, see the last post), which became widely used around the 10th century. (Europe didn’t use paper money for another 600 years).
Sneaker-dealers speculate on limited edition runs of hype shoes. Provenance and condition for them are just as important as it is for high-end art. Shoe aficionados use insider jargon like “very near deadstock,” which refers to sneakers that are barely worn. I watched the buyer on the right inspect, for about 15 minutes, the treads, laces, insoles, and even the tissue in the box. (I was surprised he didn’t pull out an Air Jordan© jeweller’s loupe). The thick-soled thicc-soled shoes (by satanist Rick Owens) worn by the guy in the image below retailed new for $1000; on the resale market a year later, $4000+ . (If unworn. Never. Wear. The. Shoes). Limited edition sneakers are very hard to understand.
Paper money was always backed by gold, all the way up to the 1970s, when the US decoupled from it, turning the US dollar into a fiat currency (backed only by the “full faith and credit” of the government, not by precious metal reserves).
Fashion is backed by the full faith and credit of the consumer. Bathing Ape (above) is a Japanese streetwear company. To get their most-coveted limited edition clothes you have to first own a BAPE NFT. An NFT is a non-fungible token, which is basically a visual digital asset, like a jpeg of a funky Ape (as with crypto, the NFT’s blockchain code creates scarcity and provenance). You buy an NFT using a digital currency like Bitcoin. (Bitcoin is not backed by gold; nor by the full faith and credit of any government).
Bitcoin was first mined (not minted) in 2009. In 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first real-world purchase using crypto. He bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins, at the time the equivalent of $41 in real cash. Bitcoin is not just a currency, it is also a stock. Somehow. You are not supposed to spend it, just invest in it, and hold on to it for dear life. Had Lazlo HODLed, that $41 dollars of Bitcoin today would be worth over a billion old-fashioned dollars — $1,027,379,668.16 USD to be exact, depending on when you are reading this. That’s more than 50 million pizzas. Crypto is hard to understand.
An empty bottle is worth about 20 cents, a can 10. The bottle collectors above, in about two hours, make enough to buy a two pizzas at 2010 prices. They come around every day, all weather, all year; you can hear their cart full of bottles rattling up the street from blocks away. Their shopping cart holds about 63 bottles. Together they make 2/10,000th of a Bitcoin an hour. If they have been doing this for a decade, five times a week, they have made potentially $100,000. Tax free.
Each Balenciaga bag above probably has $10,000 of product in it. Each bag in the load of cheap plastic recyclable bags the below man is carrying is worth even more, as they are stuffed with dozens of recycled luxury purses (Chanel, Hermes, etc).
Purses are functional holders of money, but also of value. Designer evening bags are often used to launder or transfer money. You buy a luxury clutch in one place, fly somewhere, and sell it to a dealer for a similar or higher value. A used pre-owned secondary-market Hermes bag goes for $50,000 (up 15-50% from original price.)
The man above left is a security guard returning from a money pickup at a nearby luxury brand retailer. He was accompanied by an armed guard. They walked it into a heavily armoured security truck. The man on the right is coming from a shopping spree at a luxury retailer. He got in to a Rolls-Royce Wraith. Hard to discern which of the bags have more value, the guard’s or the man’s supersized Louis Vuitton bag. One thing’s for sure: both are bright orange.
Unique cars like the above Ferrari (1971) also have great resale value — it was $100,000 in the 2000s; $400,000 by 2010, and one sold at Sotheby’s recently for $688,000 (currently about 6 Bitcoin). Cars are also used to launder money. But unlike a purse, or diamonds, or art, they can also get you to the grocery store. The most popular color of collectible cars is red, the same color as the highest-price art at auctions. (It also is the color of the shoes — $1000 value — in the forensic Nike inspection shots up top).
Coins, like the kind in the man’s* cup directly above, were given a reeded edge to deter people from shaving off small amounts of metal from the coin's circumference. The serrations made it easier to identify if a coin has been tampered with. Even tiny amounts of gold removed could significantly devalue a coin — just like a tiny divot of rubber gone from the soles would significantly devalue the Travis Scott Nike kicks above.
Tulips were also money (or a storer of value) at one point. They were introduced to Europe in the 1500s and became very fashionable among the wealthy due to their “exotic” appearance, so speculators began buying and selling tulip bulbs as a commodity. Prices skyrocketed. Some bulbs became more expensive than a luxury home (one tale has a person selling his successful mill for a single bulb.) The priciest was “Semper Augustus”, which had distinctive red striping. Like crypto, tulips were also a stock, and so traded on the exchange. Prices went up and up for about 15 years, until one auction failed, and the bubble burst.
Over the 5 years of The Window (a 24/7/365/1 photo series of ephemeral moments), I have not seen anyone trying to use tulips to buy anything, though there is a gentleman who walks the streets at twilight selling them, another who straightens them, and a woman in broad daylight who steals them. (Straightener, and then stealer, photos above. I photographed the woman furtively filling up a bag — orange —with tulips and other flowers (mostly with red ones), as well as that clump of dirt in her right hand, directly from the flower bin. She’d clearly done it many times before, efficient as she was. She appeared well-off; I imagine her penthouse garden as a grand Versailles in the sky. She probably bagged about $40 worth — 0.00001 in Bitcoin today; 2 pizzas circa 2010, a couple hours of collecting bottles). People are very hard to understand.
NOTES:
cash: /Kash/ noun - money or its equivalent** paid for goods or services at the time of purchase or delivery.
fetish: /ˈfediSH/ noun - an inanimate object*** worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
the flower-burglar at least put some physical effort into the crime, literally getting her fingers dirty and such; the biggest crypto theft (so far) has been 230 million dollars, and was done with a one-finger mouse click.
fish is cash in prison; packets of mackerel (“Macks”) are used, as are postage stamps. (Cigarettes used to be the coin of the realm, but were banned). I have not seen anyone using fish as payment over the course of taking The Window photographs, nor selling, straightening, or stealing them.
pre-1982 one-cent coins contain about 2.95 grams of copper, and because of that are worth about 2.5 cents. The US and UK still mint one-cent or pence coins, but it’s penny non grata in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, because they cost 1.6¢ to produce.
dough, bread, cheddar, stacks, bands, racks, benjamins, guap, scrilla, loot, moolah, cream, cabbage, fetti, honey, paper, cottons, dead presidents, fiats, shekels, scratchy, dosh, bones. (Only one of those synonyms is made up).
*this man is an accidental regular throughout The Window; legs of his cosmic journey appear also in these posts: “all the hills echo ha ha he he” and “Protest/Antitest” (both as last photo). The years noted on his sign have increased accordingly.
**such as a check (or a mackerel pack if you reside in the big house)
***like shoes, or handbags, or sneakers, or beanie babies, or Ferraris or Warhols, or crypto…
The Window is a infinitely recombinant single portrait of the times, composed of many inter-connected single photos of people in ephemeral-but-eternal moments:
BONUS IMAGE:
Crypto is a decentralized money, control distributed across a network of participants. Below is a decentralized painting, IOTA (LINK) — a painting in 30 discrete pieces to be distributed to and controlled by a network of collectors and institutions around the world. The work is to show every 10 years into the future, accreting stories and content as the individual pieces cross continents and generations, get sold, inherited, assembled, lost, or destroyed. (Absent pieces will be shown as voids, right image). Agreements, treaties, migration, perceived value, aura, time, gamification…
