Abstract
Medium of Exchange reframes oil as a form of international currency. It is ‘black gold,’ a liquid asset in the literal, material sense. The substance oozes across geopolitical contexts, but our experience charting its path is a mediated one - experienced through fragments of news bites instead of as a clear and direct narrative. Though all news media in the present day is definitively misleading and evasive, information regarding the oil trade has been particularly obscured from its origin. Since the 19th century boom, government and media outlets have tried tirelessly to obtain lists of stockholders in these companies, only to be met with refusals to share what should be public information. As 2000/2004 Green Party presidential nominee, Ralph Nader, once said in testimony before the US Senate, “We know more in public about the CIA and NSA than is known about the internal workings of Standard Oil.” What we do know is that the same Four Horsemen who rode to power on the crest of the oil boom over one hundred years ago are now even more firmly in control of an increasingly oil-dependent world economy; and the same old money families who own the major oil companies as well as the major banks (Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York) are still riding high in the saddle, having set the stage for permanent war in the Middle East.