Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
In the 1980s, the American artist J S G Boggs (1955-2017), who was then living in London, began drawing his own banknotes and attempting to pay with them. If that sounds more like forgery than artistry, it’s worth mentioning that his drawings, while skilful, were obviously not the real thing, and nor did he try to pass them off as such. Instead, Boggs’s project to blur the boundary between art, money and functionality meant that, if his hand-drawn banknote was accepted, he would later attempt to track it down, buy it back, and display it alongside his change and receipt. In this entertaining account of Boggs’s audacious art experiment, Tom Hockenhull, curator of medals and modern money at the British Museum, details how the work ran afoul of the Bank of England, Scotland Yard and even the British Museum itself, before Boggs forever altered the look of English banknotes.
Video by the British Museum
video
Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
video
The ancient world
Petty squabbles and bloody battles – the life of an ancient Roman soldier
18 minutes
video
Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
5 minutes
video
Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes
video
War and peace
‘She is living on in many hearts’ – Otto Frank on the legacy of his daughter’s diary
12 minutes
video
Art
Why Diego Velázquez needed a lifetime to paint his enigmatic masterpiece
31 minutes
video
Earth science and climate
There’s a ‘climate bomb’ ticking beneath the Arctic ice. How can we prepare?
8 minutes