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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

No, bartering with it doesn't make it a currency.

However what money is (the abstract concept) and what a currency is (the actual thing you use) is subjective. Art could be used as money and a currency, just as well as sea shells or cigarettes can.

The key is it being used as a medium of exchange, not as something you get for its own gain. So trading art, for the sole purpose to trade it for something else, is using it as a currency.

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Money also requires fungibility, which art certainly is not. Typically money is also supposed to be a unit of account, which both requires fungibility and universality, something art doesn’t have. Nobody values their house in paintings, that’s ridiculous, instead the house and the art gallery are measured in the local currency.

I think realistically modern art is more of an investment vehicle than a currency.

All good points.

I'll add that art is probably used for tax avoidance and money laundering as well.

But remember that Fungibility is relative because digitally the movement of USD is traceable. And all physical USD are marketed with serial numbers. Money laundering is a huge part of the financial system where $100 will be sold for $50 for the purpose of obtaining "clean" money, or where vast amounts of artificial work is expended for the purpose of funnelling cash into the mainstream. Thus $100 is not always worth $100.

That’s a fair point, but even still there is a massive gap between the fungibility of USD and art. Assuming all your money is clean, there’s literally no difference between any two given dollars. High value art on the other hand is at most produced in limited editions, and a lot of the super high value stuff is literally unique.

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