A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Empire by Bloomsbury Publishing;

Author:Bloomsbury Publishing;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter Five

Money, Art, and Representation

“T’was only a balloon”—Seeing and Satire in the Cultural History of Money

Nicky Marsh

At the end of 2011 Virgin Money was launched as a new provider of financial services in the UK. Bearing the strapline, “Virgin Money, 40 years of better now in a bank,” the advert accompanying its launch placed the Virgin brand’s association with transport at its heart, from the futurism of “Virgin Galactic” speeding through starry space to the nostalgia image of the Virgin hot-air balloon gently climbing over the English countryside. This balloon, condensed as a red bubble, went on to dominate the visual identity of Virgin Money (previously Virgin Direct) and appeared on its High Street shop hoardings and its credit cards, and formed the basis of its single visual logo. The profound irony of the rock’s absorption by a bubble—Virgin Money had bought the profitable sectors of the former building society, Northern Rock, from the government after a bail-out following the first bank run in the UK in 150 years—seemed to provide its own unwittingly wry commentary on both the abstract, speculative nature of contemporary finance and the failure of the UK Government to respond to the dangers that these were now conclusively demonstrated as possessing.

Yet Virgin Money’s use of the bubble and the balloon as visual identifiers for credit was actually in keeping with the iconographic register of the financial services industry, especially in terms of its representation of personal credit and especially after the moment of crisis. Credit cards have obviously been associated with literal and metaphorical flight since their origin in the 1950s—both the actual luxury of international travel and the imaginary luxury of being able to escape the financial constraints of one’s immediate time and space—and the hot-air balloon has been repeatedly evoked in this context. It is no surprise, then, that the aftermath of the financial crisis saw financial institutions hurrying to repair the positive associations of that which David Harvey was more critically diagnosing at the time as capital’s faltering spatial and temporal “fix” in ways that were, appropriately, both fantastic and entirely literal (Choonara 2009: 335). The crisis had yet to reach its peak when Barclaycard launched its “Waterslide” campaign in 2008 (to be supplemented by a rollercoaster in 2010),1 a strategy that was quickly emulated in 2009 as American Express and Lloyds TSB both launched campaigns that promoted flight and escape; the strapline of the former was “Come Fly with Me,” and the visuals included pictures of brightly colored planes or space rockets urging potential customers to “Be a Traveller not a Tourist,”2 and the latter was “For the Journey,” and the visuals included not only hot-air balloons but trains, planes and bicycles.3 It was not only personal credit that imagined itself in such terms at this moment: an analysis of financial adverts shown during the crash noted that in their self-representations financial institutions are “shown to exist above, outside, or across and beyond the cityscape” and their employees are subject to an

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