Money As Art: Your Favorite Geeky Characters Painted On Coins

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

robocop coinOur website may imply that all we care about are robots of a great size, or ones that do some specific task, like playing music while looking like a Hellraiser villain. But we are just as interested in robots that are tiny, and it doesn’t even have to be all of the robot. It could just be a head, painted on a coin. If that sounds oddly specific, check out the photo above to see that such a coin does in fact exist. This one bears the iconic image of RoboCop lovingly plastered on its face. I’m not sure if you could legally spend this in a store, but you could probably legally avenge your death with it.

This collection coin art, dubbed Tales You Lose, comes to us from Brazilian designer Andre Levy, currently based in Frankfort, Germany. The “About” section of the Facebook page is pretty genius: “Coins are actually massively-reproduced little sculptures. This project brings individual character to each replica, and makes us think: Are we able to like one cent more than others, just by injecting new stories in it? Those are the Tales You Lose.”

One, that’s an imaginatively solid way of adding a narrative to a part of people’s lives that they take for granted on a daily basis. Two, it’s a pretty sweet pun on the more coin-centric phrase “tails you lose.” It would be one thing if he was just painting generic faces on the coins and giving them fictional names with invented backstories, asking us to look at how we feel about individuals in the world’s population.

But instead, he put Trap Jaw on one. And that pretty much answers his first question. Can I like one cent more than the next? Definitely, if Futurama‘s Leela is depicted on it. Is there some kind of creative elite that prefers characters to the arguably legendary individuals depicted on these coins? If there is, sign me up.

Take a look at some more of Levy’s excellent work below. It’s refreshing when someone doesn’t just do Star Wars and Star Trek characters, isn’t it?

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Flash Gordon! Bride of Frankenstein! Aunty Entity!

As a lowly Internet writer, there are very few times in my life when I see money as something other than, “What I really need right now to pay bills and keep my debt to a whisper.” But Levy has caused me to take a moment to pause and reflect on what physical money can stand for, even though most of my finances are done electronically at this point. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a picture painted on a piece of legal tender may be priceless.

Check out the rest of Levy’s work on his Tumblr page. Enjoy it with a nice milk, won’t you?

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