Mel Bochner’s Money/Nothing is a vivid, biting meditation on language, capitalism, and the cultural obsession with wealth. Rendered in his signature style of thick, painterly text on a black ground, the work lists slang terms and euphemisms for money in bold, brightly colored letters that seem to shout from the surface. Below, the tone turns caustic and self-reflexive, with inverted text that reads like an unraveling tirade - an explosion of frustration, cynicism, and moral decay.

As with much of Bochner’s work, Money/Nothing merges linguistic play with conceptual rigor: the accumulation of words mirrors the accumulation of wealth, and their repetition exposes both the absurdity and the power of cultural value systems. This text-as-image composition exemplifies Bochner’s exploration of how meaning and emotion are constructed through language, offering a sharp, witty critique of greed and the commodification of everything - even art itself.