About Works in Money: Are you put off by so-called ready-mades, i.e., mass-produced commodities staged as works of art? Yet are you also fascinated by them? Why do such factory-made objects take up uncanny residence in art-world spaces? Such ambivalence is no accident, and needs explanation. Works in Money exposes and clarifies this ambivalence. First the set-up: All works are made of money or commodities. (Some are counterfeit, as a conceptual foil). There is a built-in (high) value of each work. The face value of each is its de-facto art-world minimum or floor value. This ensures speculative valuation above it. The pay-off: The art world is the only institution where money or fungible commodities can be worth more than their legal or exchangeable selves. Why so? Because we live in a world of industrial capitalism, a post-artisanal realm of spiritlessly substitutable items. A separate "art world" is a symptomatic response to this massive change in production. No art world was necessary (or intelligible) in a world of things made only by hand. We are drawn to this space where the spiritless gets transformed by the artist, yet disturbed that the artist has appropriated an unchanged object of anonymous labor. My artist statement and philosophical essay explain the necessity of this historically recent art-world function. In short: the art world is where people can assert the absolute specialness of creative mind (or "spirit") in a world of machine-made things. Artists do this by altering such items conceptually, not by hand. The art world both allows and enforces this indiscernible "transfiguration of the commonplace," to quote and subvert Arthur Danto's influential, optimistic, Hegelian theory. For him and others, the artist is now a philosopher, and the art world is a liberating space of aura, spirit, mind, etc. And it is, but only because a world of mechanized production conditions its existence in the first place, which is no liberation. And only capital, i.e., excess pricing, can possibly instantiate such a spiritual transfiguration of fungibles. Other artists (Duchamp, R. Morris, J. Beuys, J. S. G. Boggs) have implied this power. My work distills it. A crucial difference between Works in Money and other examples is its unique exhibition structure, which guarantees the sale of objects (at higher than their face values). (The quilts, while not strictly ready-mades, broaden the staging of these ideas; ready-mades focus the exhibition.) The exhibit is designed as a concrete demonstration of what the eponymous essay argues theoretically. James Moyer © 2023 James Moyer.