Levine Letters: Matt Kane's Cuius et Solum
Recently, the American Numismatic Society (ANS), the most significant collection of monetary history in the United States and one of the largest in the world, announced the move of its collection to Toledo, Ohio, where it will be co-located on the campus of the Toledo Museum of Art. ANS has 800,000 objects in its collection ranging from ancient Chinese coinage to rare US banknotes; it also features a fascinating range of non-state currency—that is, currency issued by non-governmental actors. Though not currently in ANS’s collection, cryptocurrency is the most recent chapter of this history and Cuius Est Solum by Matt Kane is a fitting interrogation of how value is determined and stored in an increasingly digital world.
Cuius Est Solum is atypical for Kane, whose normal works are layered and colorful, leveraging the artist’s own code rather than a dialog with an LLM. Cuius Est Solum, by contrast, is a composition inspired by the dollar bill of the United States in the Ghibli style. Its aesthetic may be muted and straightforward like the currency from which it draws inspiration, but its commentary on the crypto-centric world for which it was produced is worthy of discussion.
At the left of the composition, six deceased chickens of varying sizes lay on the ground with an aircraft flying overhead. Emerging from the sloped brush at right, the B-29 bomber carries the name ‘ENOLA’ immediately beneath its cockpit. At right, a proud, large rooster stands as if to confront the bomber from which it is separated by a central roundel. That central field encircles an inscription, CUIUS EST SOLUM, EIUS EST USQUE AD COELUM ET AD INFEROS, which translates from Latin as ‘whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to heaven and down to hell.’ This relatively thin, green script on a light background contrasts with a heavier white typeface on a green background below, proclaiming in English, ‘No Place in the Modern World.’
With this work, the artist is referencing a 1946 United States Supreme Court case, United States vs Causby, in which low-flying military planes buzzed Thomas Lee Causby’s farm in Greensboro, North Carolina. The vibrations killed more than 150 chickens. The Supreme Court reaffirmed an earlier ruling that while navigable airspace above a certain height is public domain, lower airspace—one that interferes with terrestrial uses—is owned by the property owner.
This case found in favor of Mr. Causby, but established the legal precedent that the property rights do not extend infinitely upwards, or, as the court put it, the idea of ad coelum has ‘no place in the modern world.’ Importantly, in legal doctrine, the Supreme Court found that the military aircraft had ‘taken’ Mr. Causby’s property. A ‘taking’ is legally justifiable—we call it eminent domain today—but it requires ‘just compensation,’ according to the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
What on its surface might seem an esoteric exploration of US law is in fact a meditation on how technology changes the ways we think about ownership and compensation. The technology of flight, in this case, caused settled doctrine to be reimagined. With the advent of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and AI, Kane asks us with this work—made in the form of the fiat reserve currency and with a Latin inscription standing in as a signifier of its perceived (but questionable) durability—to interrogate how a dominant logic may come to be revised in the future.
Matt Kane is well-positioned to ask these questions. He has been an outspoken advocate for the importance of Blockchain in supporting artist royalties (and in platforms that offer artists royalties), a different approach to ownership of the future proceeds of creative work. His series Right Place, Right Time was the first work of ‘cryptoart’ (as it was then called) to break $100,000 when it launched in 2020, codifying Bitcoin’s price volatility over a 24-hour period—an artwork whose sale placed a value ($100,000) on a store of value’s (Bitcoin’s) change in value (volatility). And the inclusion of an AI hallucination of the Enola Gay, a plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and never came close to Mr. Causby’s farm, underscores how AI can almost compulsively make something look valuable (in this case in the form of currency) even if it is outright wrong. These experiments and others point to Kane’s intense interest in how technology changes what gets valued, how, and by whom.
With this in mind, it is particularly intriguing to consider what is missing from this work. There is no denomination for our imagined bill, nor is there any sense of whether this is the front or back. One might wonder what the other side of the bill would look like, but it may be just as well that we remember in the digital world there does not need to be a second side—the rules can and will be reinvented. The obverse and the reverse can be superimposed. A US plane that wrought carnage in Japan can be rendered in the style of Japanese Studio on a composition reminiscent of US currency. Technology can confer (and confuse) value as much as sovereigns. Cuius Est Solum is made to look simple, but it offers us more questions than answers.
— Adam Levine, Director, Toledo Museum of Art
