Adam Basanta

The emphasis here is geographic but also conceptual, referring to a Western way of thinking about knowledge, technology, history, and progress, and how these concepts intertwine to reinforce once another in a larger cultural narrative.
Prominent museums, including the ones whose databases are used in this project, have a complicated history with their collections. On the one hand, they preserve a history of human production, from ancient artifacts to contemporary artworks. On the other hand, many of the items in their collection – and this is especially true of historical artifacts – are compromised in terms of provenance and ownership: they may have been taken without permission from other cultures, or are not returned to cultural institutions who request their return (the Elgin Marbles controversy had just begun as I was conceptualizing the project). Furthermore, these cultural artifacts are presented and historicized through a Western perspective, with indigenous items de- and re-contextualized into a narrative of Western values which nonetheless appeals to claims of universalism. So in effect, even when the artifact is not Western, it is presented within a Western linear narrative of cultural production.

So in a sense, International Gold Standard 001 is an exercise in subjecting Western European artifacts to the same process of re-contextualization. There is an irony in that this re-contextualization occurs using the conceptual pillars of Western thought: by using technology to indiscriminately collect cherished artifacts which the museum provides freely online as a gesture of open-access or “knowledge democratization”, and subsequently transform them without any particular regard to the specificity of their origins. The idea of creating a pan-European coin, monetary technology which advertise the image of a ruler’s face, in this way seemed poignant given the current politics of the EU.