Debtors’ Vision
As a 28-year-old art student, Thomas Gokey convinced the Federal Reserve to give him bags of shredded currency worth $49,983, the exact amount of his ballooning student loan debt. He pulped the scraps, turned the paste into four enormous sheets of paper, and began offering piecemeal sales—$4.22 a square inch.
In 2011, when the artwork was accepted in an annual competition—“the American Idol of art,” as Gokey describes it—that had been founded by the son of billionaire heir (and future Education Secretary) Betsy DeVos, he saw another shot at paying off the debt. Buyers had been scarce, but his project sparked conversations with other debtors. Anthropologist David Graeber had just published his opus on the topic; Gokey found it “a secret decoder ring” unveiling how debt enshrined divides of gender, race, and class.
The week of the contest, Gokey weighed joining an upcoming protest against economic inequality that he’d heard
