UC Irvine

Consider this book a catalog for an exhibition that never happened. Each contribution takes up an ephemeral object connected to the act of payment, a transactional thing that unlike metal coins or paper banknotes would rarely make it into a display case-or, in some cases, even be impossible to curate. Money is the most obvious transactional thing. It is used for billions of transactions every minute, the sum total of which we call an “economy.” Museums have money galleries, displaying coins, notes, and some of the other objects that people have used historically to conduct transactions—pretty things like beads, shells, stones, and metal ingots. Such items have been displaced by coins and cash, and commentators today predict the imminent demise of those transactional things, too, heralding a cashless future in the face of digital technologies of payment. Supposedly, the pretty things will get replaced by pure data. Increasingly, however, monetary transactions have begun to require even more things. There are payment cards, mobile phones, electronic point-of-sale terminals, networks of wire, and webs of radio signals. Money-like things, too, have started to multiply. More and more, people are using frequent-flier miles, coupons, cryptographic currencies, and sharing economy platforms to conduct transactions. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer puts it, “money multiplies,” and how.