Museum’s History of Gold Includes ‘Standard’ Appeal
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Riffing off its wildly successful (among toddlers, at least) gem room, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled a new exhibit this past weekend that has some New Yorkers wondering if it isn’t time once again to peg the dollar to the price of gold.
Nestled among Liz Taylor’s jewelry and Susan Sarandon’s Oscar statue is a geometric array of gold bars from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and a concise account of the development of monetary systems along a gold standard.
This is first and foremost a museum of science, but visitors get a lesson in economics as well (which some would argue is an important science itself).
“O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper, which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour,” the Romantic poet Lord Byron wrote in a verse posted among the exhibits.
These days paper stands in for the Golden Rule.
The exhibition’s chairman and curator, Chuck Spencer, lends considerable anthropological expertise and insight to the exhibit, linking the hierarchies of past societies to their use and distribution of gold. “When we think of gold as valuable, it’s not valuable in nature. It gets its value and meaning from human culture,” he said.
His framework applies seamlessly to finance, where political and social issues tied to possessing gold are given a more quantitative edge. Universal recognition of gold’s value facilitated early trade and contact among cultures. Today it’s still a vital part of the global economy.
The price of gold has hit new records periodically during the past few years and still surpasses $600 a troy ounce. The parallels between the metal and crude oil — or “black gold” — are mentioned in the exhibit. Oil’s value, like gold, fluctuates in response to discovery and production, and its scarcity has provoked similarly strong emotional, political, and even military reactions.
Gold’s primary use, however, remains tied to luxury goods. According to a geologist and curator of the exhibit, James Webster, 78% of gold production goes toward jewelry and decorations despite its technological applications. Like oil, this demand is also pushing discovery and production as a rising middle class of consumers in China and India seeks oil for cars and airplanes and gold to represent prosperity and success.