American money gets uglier

I am jealous of the currency in other countries; not because of the value of it, but because of the color in it.

I started seeing the new $10 bill at my work a week or two ago. The first one I saw, a neurotic woman was about to use to pay for her purchase.
"Is this real?" she asked me.
"That's odd," I said, looking at the bill.
I marked it with the counterfeit-detector pen, and it looked good, then I held it up to the light, and it had a watermark in it.
"It seems real, but I've never seen it before, " I told her. "Maybe it's fake."
"Well then I want to pay with it," she said, appearing anxious about the possibility that her money might be counterfeit.
"I'll take it," I told her. "It's probably a limited edition. Look, it says 2004 on it. It's two years old, but it looks new."
She quickly changed her mind and took the bill back from me. "Good," I thought, "it was probably a fake."

The next day, I saw a few more, and now they're everywhere. I don't like the redesign. I do not appreciate it's aesthetic feel.
The bill looks like a dehydrated person pissed all over it, and then left it in the sun for a week. Then a conservatively prudish and retarded art school graduate was given a red highlighter that was almost out of ink, and told to: "go wild!"; which the graduate did with it's typical lack of gusto.

A Google Image Search for "currency" yields a whole page of links to money that is prettier and more colorful than ours. I'm not including coins in my jealousy; our coins are satisfactory to me. It is our bills that I would like to see really improved.
I believe that Australia has the best example of why our money seems deficient to me.
Their money has depictions of famous Australian artists and prominent members of the culture. Here, you have to be the president to get on a bill. The bills are vibrantly multicolored and shiny and made of plastic. If I were to make space money from the future, I would make it look a little like this.
Our bills are drab and mostly of the same color palette; the few attempts to add color that have been made so far appear to be the work of a printer dying of leukemia; it's soul leaking out with the marrow of it's fading ink.
We are security obsessed, and are ignoring the face we show to the world. The lack of aesthetic appeal of our money is just one more example of the sad state that America is grasping at in it's current decline.