ABSTRACT
The United States, the first place in the Western world where paper money was widely used,1 is an interesting locale for the study of representation and exchange in art. This is not only because the United States sometimes presents itself as a “secular”—hence supposedly non-Christian-state. It is also because in nineteenth-century America there raged an extensive debate about paper money that, like the discussion of coinage in “religious” Byzantium, had aesthetic as well as political implications.
