The Currency Project
The Currency Project (TCP) is a long-durational conceptual art practice embedded within a real-world marketplace. Operating through the global trading card economy, the project explores how value is created, exchanged, and perceived across economic and social systems.
By placing artworks directly into circulation, TCP engages existing structures of trade and participation, allowing meaning and value to emerge through lived interaction.
Why Trading Cards?
Trading cards exist within an active, global marketplace where value is constantly negotiated through exchange. By working within this system, TCP engages a structure where pricing, scarcity, and demand are continuously shaped by participation.
This allows the project to operate in real time, using an existing economy to explore how value forms and shifts through interaction.
Exploring Value through Process
Authentic trading cards are artistically altered and uniquely numbered before reentering the trading card ecosystem via no-reserve, 7-day eBay auction starting at $0.99. Upon completion of the auction, each work is formally recorded in the project’s ledger.
General Ledger
The TCP General Ledger is a public record of all works released through the project, documenting each artwork and its corresponding auction history. It serves as a point of refrence for provenance and provides open access to the full history of the project.
Through 2026, over 160 works have completed the project cycle and are recorded in the ledger.
Gallery Shows
Trophic Cascade, Ridgewood, New York - 2022
Street-facing TCP auction installation (live-streamed)
Trophic Conversion, Brooklyn, New York, 2020
Three-channel interactive installation with live auction
Selected Works - Various Artists
TCP operates within a lineage of conceptual practices engaging systems of value and exchange, with affinities to artists such as David Hammons’ Blizzard Ball Sale and Gabriel Orozco’s Oroxxo.