JSG Boggs

J.S.G. Boggs is an American artist best known for his hand-drawn, one-sided copies of US banknotes. He does not attempt to spend these "Boggs notes" as legal tender. Boggs spends his bills only for their face value. If he draws a $10 bill, he exchanges it for $10 worth of goods. He then sells any change he gets, the receipt, and sometimes the goods he purchased as his artwork. If the collector wants the Boggs note, he must track it down himself. Boggs will tell a collector where he spent the note, but he does not sell them directly. Any person who gets a Boggs note can usually sell it for much more than its face value: a $10 Boggs note may be worth more than a thousand dollars. So any person who knows about Boggs is likely to accept a Boggs note. For this reason, Boggs prefers to spend his art with people with people who are unfamiliar with his work. He likes people to make a conscious choice to accept art instead of money, and their knowing how much money his art is actually worth spoils it. He views these "transactions" as a type of performance art, but the authorities often view them with suspicion. Boggs aims to have his audience question and investigate just what it is that makes "money" valuable in the first place. He steadfastly denies that he is a counterfeiter or forger, maintaining that a good-faith transaction between informed parties is certainly not fraud, even if the item transacted happens to resemble negotiable currency.

Boggs was first arrested for counterfeiting in England in 1986, but was acquitted. He was arrested for a second time in Australia in 1989, but also acquitted. Since 1990 some of his work and even his personal effects have been confiscated by the United States Secret Service Counterfeiting Division, although no legal case has been brought against him.

Recently, Boggs has moved on beyond his hand-drawn works, and embraced digital technology, creating his latest works on the computer. These works resemble paper money in fundamental ways, but add subtle twists. One of his better-known works is a series of bills done for the Florida United Numismatists' annual convention. Denominations from $1 to $50 (and perhaps higher) feature designs taken from the reverse sides of contemporary U.S. currency, modified slightly through the changing of captions (notably, "The United States of America" is changed to "Florida United Numismatists" and the denomination wording is occasionally replaced by the acronym "FUN") and visual details (the mirroring of Monticello on the $2, the Supreme Court building, as opposed to the U.S. Treasury, on the $10, and an alternate angle for the White House on the $20). They were printed in bright orange on one side, and featured Boggs's autograph and thumbprint on the other. The total run was several hundred, and they command a modest premium, but not as much as his older, hand-drawn works.

Other money art that he has designed include the mural "All the World's a Stage", roughly based on a British 20-pound note and featuring Shakespearean themes, as well as banknote-sized creations that depict Boggs's ideas as to what U.S. currency should look like. A $100 featuring Harriet Tubman is one known example.

A good, though slightly outdated, reference on Boggs is Lawrence Weschler's book Boggs: a Comedy of Values.

Other money artists include William Harnett, John F. Peto, and John Haberle, who made trompe l'oeil paintings of U.S. currency in the 1880s and Otis Kaye, who made both paintings similar to Harnett, and also actual-size pen-and-ink drawings similar to Boggs, from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Also related is Emanuel Ninger (Jim the Penman), who drew counterfeit notes, with the intent to defraud, by hand in the 1880s.

External links

• Transcript of Boggs' appeal hearing (http://www.jsgboggs.com/trans.html)
• Video of a Boggs exchange, an interview and more (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/egg/217/boggs/)