The Visual Rhetoric of Money

Money is a convention. It realizes itself in daily discourse: What money is, how it works and if it works – all that depends on what is told and what is thought about money, if people trust it and if they accept its value. There are ‹narratives› circulating in a society, which influence the relation to, the thinking about and the dealing with money – such as: «money works for its owner», «money can be safely invested», «money does not grow on trees». With money being a mere social convention, these ‹narratives› reveal their arbitrary character specially when contradictory: «dirty money» vs. «money has no smell», «money should be saved» vs. «money should be spent», «money does not buy happiness» vs. «money talks».

Many of these ‹narratives› are mediated through pictures: the image on the credit card, the advertising poster of the bank, the stacks in the gangster movie. But how exactly do these visual ‹narratives› of money work – formally, visually and in regard to a motivating action? By what visual-rhetorical means are they communicated?

The project at hand intends to analyse systematically the role that visual communication plays within the ‹money discourse›, way beyond the design of a bill. Any visual material, which either represents, shows or addresses money, forms the object of investigation. The Bern University of Arts (HKB) developed a model for rhetorical design analysis, which involves a comparative and an experimental step. The goal is to outline a theory of the visual rhetoric of money starting from ten exemplary narratives and their visual communication patterns.