The coin room. In any museum you might care to think of, it is surely the least beloved of galleries, hurried through impatiently by visitors stampeding for Egyptian mummies or Impressionist paintings. Even those of us who pine for old-fashioned, cluttered cabinets of ‘stuff’, edged out lately by interactive, immersive experiences, must be honest: we probably never lingered long among the cases of near-identical brown coins anyway.

It is a bold move on the part of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, then, to devote its exhibition gallery for five months to Money Talks: Art, Society and Power. Yet this is a thought-provoking exhibition, which addresses its theme from countless perspectives, bringing together paintings, decorative objects, machinery and film, as well as coins and banknotes themselves, in order to tell interesting stories about mankind and its transactions.

An anteroom confronts us, first, with two arresting golden objects – a sculpture of the Indian goddess Shiva, where the deity herself has been replaced by a concrete ball encrusted with coins, and an immense gaudy dollar symbol by Andy Warhol – announcing that this will be an exhibition that ranges globally in focus, and will, at times, provoke or confuse. Three galleries follow, the first devoted, broadly speaking, to the processes of designing and producing money, the second to ways in which themes relating to money and society are represented in art, and the third to recent or contemporary artistic reflections on money.

Within each room (though rather less clearly in the final one), there are distinct miniature exhibitions, each serving as a case study to exemplify a particular theme. No attempt is made to trace a line of chronological development and, rather surprisingly, the exhibition draws only very lightly on the museum’s own rich collection of Greek, Celtic, Roman, Byzantine, Medieval and Islamic coins, though you can, of course, see them elsewhere in the building. Those Roman coins that do feature were donated or lent by Oxford colleges, as were pieces of high-table silverware decadently studded with coins – a reminder of the vast reserves of wealth concentrated in this small city.

Money can, itself, be a form of art, as illustrated here by the fine calligraphy on centuries-old Middle-Eastern banknotes and exquisite Jugendstil ones from turn-of-the-century Austria. In a display of art-deco British and Irish coinage, the exhibition also draws our attention to the connection between money and the design aesthetics of a particular historical moment. Money, in its physical form, can be just as attuned to the zeitgeist as architecture and fashion, albeit somewhat slower to change, serving as a tangible historical document of the values and ‘look’ of an age. For this reason, as for countless more practical ones, we should beware the cashless society.

The exhibition does a particularly good job of revealing the painstaking artistic labour and perfectionist impulses that go into designing the money that ends up in your pocket. Among the banknotes and coins displayed here are many that were ultimately, for a variety of reasons, never put into circulation. Being a famous artist was no guarantee of having your design actually made up, a lesson learned by Gustav Klimt, no less. It is fascinating to see on display for the first time a complete set of Edward VIII ‘trial coins’ – the coinage the nation never had – and to learn about the short-reigned king’s ambitions to depict himself as the embodiment of modernity.

Whose image appears on banknotes and why? This is a question explored in a striking display of photographic portraits of Elizabeth II, positioned effectively above a variety of international banknotes that draw upon the exact-same images. A world map, showing all the countries whose currency depicted this individual woman’s face, from Belize to Fiji, is a breathtaking way of illustrating the extent of historic British global influence.

The question of whether money is, at its simplest level, a good or a bad thing is one of the deeper themes running throughout the exhibition. In the second room, opposing walls present ‘Eastern perspectives’ and ‘Western perspectives’ on money. It is striking that while the Eastern artworks take a positive view of wealth, in a variety of paintings, prints, bronzes and sculptures of deities who would hopefully bestow prosperity and plenitude on the owner, the Western view of wealth is presented far more ambivalently.

Here, in paintings dating from the 16th century to the early 20th, money is often linked to morality, and we are presented with a succession of misers, moneylenders, people examining banknotes anxiously for fraud, and others rendered ugly by greed. A highly detailed engraving by an anonymous Flemish follower of Bruegel entitled ‘The Battle of the Money Bags and the Strong Boxes’ even shows monetary receptacles brawling, a novel way of demonstrating that money is the root not necessarily of all evil but of a great deal of conflict.

The more recent art works in the third gallery work even harder to teach us a moral lesson, though generally speaking you have to read the accompanying card to grasp the point. Ingrid Pitzer’s Geldkuchen, a ‘cake’ made out of old Deutschmarks, laments the fact that money is rarely divided up and served in equal portions. Susan Stockwell’s spectacular Money Dress is a beautiful and interesting object in its own right, but has a subtext, being, in the artist’s words, ‘based on the idea of female territory and power being enabled by economic independence’. Joseph Beuys has scribbled on banknotes to show that ‘everyone is an artist’, though judging by this work, not necessarily much of one.

Lest everything should get too sanctimonious, this is also a surprisingly witty exhibition. Late 18th-century visual satires lampoon the economic policies of the era, much as a Times caricaturist would today. A massive £10-note-shaped tapestry by Grayson Perry references aspects of the British national character in all its banality. The late Queen would probably have smiled wryly at her cartoonish representation here, though perhaps not at being replaced by the face of Princess Diana on a banknote designed by Banksy. The exhibition’s curators have playfully balanced quotations that give capitalism a bashing with others that present an opposing blow. (‘Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping,’ said Gertrude Stein.)

One might argue that there is so much variety here that it doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts. But perhaps we should be grateful for the lack of a single overriding message. Some sociological pontificating on the accompanying notes notwithstanding, the curators largely leave it up to the individual visitor to draw their own connections and threads between the objects on display. Many will surely be tempted to pay a return visit.

Only the last section of the exhibition fails to spark the imagination, with its bewildering art works about cryptocurrency, incomprehensible to this reviewer at least. Thankfully, this rather disconcerting vision of an abstract future driven by AI is not where the story ends. Set apart from everything else, just before you leave the room, is a maquette for a new coin bearing the image of Charles III. We leave the exhibition reassured: hard cash lives on, the old ways of the world still have currency, and all may yet be well.

Money Talks: Art, Society and Power is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until 5 January 2025.