History of Paper Money: Series Art (Patreon)
Content
P.S. Can you figure out what's written in binary code around the coin? Or what the plant on the coin represents? Or the additional play on words (in French)?
P.P.S. Adding another hint to make things more Fair and help those Sage folks with a True Love of riddles, who are still trying to figure out the plant reference: these are the leaves of an herb. A very common herb, but no, it's not Parsley, it's...
P.P.S. THYME! All of the riddles have now been deciphered, so let's share them here. Much love to our commenters who worked on untangling this one!
1) The Treachery of Images - René Magritte, the famous surrealist, once painted a pipe and wrote beneath it (in French) "This is not a pipe." As he explained it, it was just a picture of a pipe - it couldn't do any pipe things, so it wasn't really a pipe, was it? This series art directly references that famous painting. Like the pipe, this picture of a gold coin can't do any of the things money does (it's just a picture!) but here the phrase "This is not money" also references of John Law's idea that money like gold coins are a means of exchange whose value lies in our willingness to trade them. In itself, without our willingness to consider it valuable, it is not necessarily "money."
2) Ce n'est pas l'argent - Setting aside our questionable French grammar :(, "argent" in French means money... but it also means "silver." This gold coin is making the joke that not only is it not money, it is also (quite literally) not silver.
3) 1s and 0s - The French text says that "this is not money," yet the binary code around the coin reads "But aren't I?" We like the coin's sass, but we also thought it would be fun to slip this in as a little reference to digital cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (even though we are not discussing them directly in this series).
4) Thyme is Money - Those leaves on the coin are thyme, and as the English proverb says, "Time is money!" Once again, the question of what money really means to us may be more complicated than we think... or maybe this particular coin is just a incorrigible jokester.