"How art and commerce came habitually to be regarded as symmetrical or commensurate involves both the aesthetic anxiety (linked with beliefs about God) that monetary form is intrinsic to art and the economic anxiety (linked with theories of adequation and representation) that aesthetic form is intrinsic to money. Christians, we have seen, believe generally in a God both universal (like the Jewish and Moslem God) and incarnate (like the Greek Gods); and so for many Christians money, which is both an inscription and an inscribed thing, was not easy to understand in terms other than as a Christlike iconic principle competing like the Gygean Devil for God's place in the world."
Marc Shell Art and Money (1995) p.133
