New Money a Zero With Art Critics

Finally, somebody has come out against money.

Oddly, the new U.S. currency has drawn enemies, and they are the elite cultural critics of the world, as viewed from Manhattan. With a haute culture sneer, they have vilified the cleaner, greener bills.

“Everybody hates them,” Adam Gopnik of New Yorker magazine wrote recently of the new $20 bill. “Everybody who sees the New Money says that is doesn’t look like money. Everybody says that it looks like coupons, like play money, like funny money, like fake money.”

The New York Times critic had already weighed in--with 1,338 words, no less--and found the redesigned $100, $50 and $20 bills “crude, brash and ill-proportioned.” These scribes did wink a bit at their own hyperbole, as if to acknowledge that American culture has become so degraded that there’s nothing left to criticize except money.

In a phone interview from Paris, where Gopnik earns his pay in francs, he admits saying that “everybody” shares his opinion is a “touch of excusable exaggeration” and rather apologetically explains that he intended to produce “a comic essay, as unserious as anything I’ve written.”

But they weren’t laughing over in the marbled hallways of the U.S. Treasury Department, where sometime in the early 1980s the government’s money makers decided the currency had to be re-engineered to thwart thugs with fancy copy machines.

“We redesigned the currency to stay ahead of counterfeiters,” Treasury spokesman Howard Schloss said dryly. “Art critics in New York rarely counterfeit.”

There was similar equanimity in the dim warrens of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where, daily, $540 million worth of currency rolls off the presses.

There, the designers of the first new American currency in 70 years had the dual concern of making every dot and dash foil high-tech criminals as well as serving an aesthetic need to make American money--so influenced by Greco-Roman design--look the same as always yet vastly different.

On the top floors of the bureau, where the security (locks, pass cards, bars and electric doors) is tighter and tougher than one might expect at the Bureau of Prisons, journeymen engravers such as Tom Hipschen and designers like Len Buckley and Jack Ruther have spent lifetimes preparing for this.

“It’s understandable that people don’t like change, so we just eat it,” says Buckley, who, like many critics of his work, hails from New York City but, like the Dodgers, comes from its borough of Brooklyn.

“This was not a slap-and-paste thing by any sense,” adds Buckley, who has been with the bureau for 30 years. “There are artistic concepts here, but it’s industrial design. You don’t build a bridge and say, ‘I need water to cross.’ ”

In fact, in the very specified field of engraving, someone like Hipschen is a world-renowned “artist.”

A tall, bearded son of an Iowa farmer, Hipschen came to Washington when he was 18 to serve a coveted bureau apprenticeship in engraving bank notes and postage stamps. Thirty years later, he is still working in the same sky-lit office with peeling paint and a dying avocado tree. Day in and day out, he etches the faces of famous Americans on hard steel.

In the early 1990s, when the Treasury Department announced there would be a new $100 bill, Hipschen was asked to engrave a new, larger Ben Franklin. His face of Franklin became the first new portrait to appear on American currency since 1928.

To prepare, Hipschen read five Franklin biographies and spent hours studying the Founding Father’s portrait in the National Gallery of Art. After he had lavished 500 hours on the actual engraving, critics sneered that this Ben had a “banker’s smirk” and overly thick hair.

“You have to have a thick skin,” Hipschen says. “But I tried to make it into a real portrait with a fixed gaze that would catch people. I wanted [Franklin] to look happy.”

But even Hipschen understands why the elimination of a lot of scrolly lines that ornately framed Franklin’s portrait on the old C-spots gives him a “clean, cold look” that the public may not like.

The new designs were pieced together, in part, around the demands of bureaucrats from several federal agencies--from FBI agents to bureau dye makers and Federal Reserve Board members. So the visually impaired got a large-type “20” on the bottom right-hand corner of the greenback. The security-minded got watermark images and invisible threads--and much more. The dye makers got color-shifting ink.

But if federal officials think they’ve heard the last of the whiners, just wait until late next year, when the $10 bill is reissued without the image of an early horseless carriage on the back.

“There will be no more automobiles,” says Ruther, declining to elaborate further.

Ruther is the artist who drew new views of the White House on the $20 bill and the Capitol on the $50 bill. He also has been critical to the redesign of smaller denominations, but he can’t talk about them except to say, once again, that the changes will be obvious yet subtle: “The people on the back of the 10 aren’t going to suddenly show up in bell-bottom trousers.”

In fact, behind all the new designs is the hope that anywhere in the world--60% of all U.S. currency circulates outside its borders--people will be able “to throw a 20, a 50 or a one on a table and recognize that they’re all American and all related,” says Ruther.

The designers are experimenting with colored ink, and they expect that it won’t be another 70 years before they start fashioning new money again, according to Schloss at the Treasury Department.

In the meantime, the government launched an ambitious education program to introduce the currency. But the advertisements for money that showed up on billboards and in subways were a little baffling to some consumers, who really don’t need to be sold on this particular product.

After all, whether it’s beautiful, ugly, old or new, money is money; hand it over. Right?

Not according to Gopnik. Here’s what he wrote: “We are disturbed by the New Money because it uses the traditional satiric devices of exaggeration, displacement and oversimplification, and therefore seems to be offering some kind of comment on the Old Money.”

When asked whether this means that, if offered, he’d prefer the more elegant, old $10 bill over a spanking new $50 bill, Gopnik laughs ever so quietly, reiterating that his musings, after all, were suggested by his editor back in New York who thought it would be “a bit of fun to put an art critic’s eye on the money.”

“My heart,” he explains, “is really with the artisans with the impossible task of redesigning these things.”

And so he would take that crisp new 50 over the old 10? “I can only spend francs,” Gopnik demurs. “It wouldn’t do me any good. I could only put it up on my wall.”