Legend has it that Salvador Dalí paid for dinners by drawing on the back of his checks.
Nobody knows if it's entirely true. Maybe it was Picasso. Maybe the details grew over time, as beautiful stories tend to do.
But the mechanism it describes is real:
Dalí had turned his name into a currency.
The check wasn't worth the money written on it, it was worth something because he had touched it.
The restaurateur didn't cash it because he understood something fundamental:
value doesn't live in the object, it lives in the consensus around it.
This isn't some quirky principle of contemporary art.
It's the principle behind every currency in history.
Gold is valuable because enough of us decided it was.
The dollar is valuable because we trust whoever issues it.
Bitcoin is valuable because a sufficient number of people chose to believe in it, with no one forcing them to.
The difference between a banknote and a random piece of paper isn't the material.
It's the shared story we build around it.
Dalí may have known this. Or maybe he didn't.
But the legend knows it on his behalf.
GM 🫂🎨