Career
Boggs (Steve Litzner) was born in Woodbury, New Jersey, U.S.A., in 1955. Any person who gets a Boggs note can usually sell it for much more than its face value: a $10 Boggs note may be worth more than $1000. Any person who knows about Boggs is likely to accept a Boggs note; for this reason, Boggs prefers to spend his art with people who are unfamiliar with his work. He likes people to make a conscious choice to accept art instead of money, believing or knowing how much money his art is actually worth spoils it. He views these "transactions" as a type of performance art, but the authorities often view them with suspicion. Boggs aims to have his audience question and investigate just what it is that makes "money" valuable in the first place. He steadfastly denies that he is a counterfeiter or forger, maintaining that a good-faith transaction between informed parties is certainly not fraud, even if the item transacted happens to resemble negotiable currency.
Recently, Boggs has moved on beyond his hand-drawn works and embraced digital technology, creating his latest works on the computer. These works resemble paper money in fundamental ways but add subtle twists. One of his better-known works is a series of bills done for the Florida United Numismatists' annual convention. Denominations from $1 to $50 (and perhaps higher) feature designs taken from the reverse sides of contemporary U.S. currency, modified slightly through the changing of captions (notably, "The United States of America" is changed to "Florida United Numismatists" and the denomination wording is occasionally replaced by the acronym "FUN") and visual details (the mirroring of Monticello on the $2, the Supreme Court building, as opposed to the U.S. Treasury, on the $10 and an alternate angle for the White House on the $20). They were printed in bright orange on one side and featured Boggs's autograph and thumbprint on the other. The total run was several hundred and they command a modest premium but not as much as his older, hand-drawn works.
Other money art that he has designed include the mural "All the World's a Stage", roughly based on a Bank of England Series D 20-pound note and featuring Shakespearean themes, as well as banknote-sized creations that depict Boggs's ideas as to what U.S. currency should look like. A $100 featuring Harriet Tubman is one known example.
Read more about this topic: J. S. G. Boggs
Famous quotes containing the word career:
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