While the Internet discusses the fashion for minimalism and companies choose to sell the idea of quiet luxury, in certain parts of reality money grabbing is flourishing on a scale reminiscent of the fat first decade of the 21^st century.  TikTok posts on the trend for sable hats and coats fit to be worn by the wives of Russian oligarchs follow close on the heels of short clips promoting conscious consumption and the #nobuy movement. The world is confused by the excitements of capitalism, an emotional upset whose side effects include this radical difference in ways of existing and making sense of possible variants of society’s development. At times like this what happens to art? In a situation where almost everything that is created has to be economically effective, can there be art that is not linked to capital? Here we ponder these unanswered questions based on consideration of the art produced by Alex Monopoly during the previous economic meltdown.

When it comes to Alec Monopoly’s personal history, the net offers us discussions on Reddit but few real facts. Inspired by the example of Banksy, Alec spent the first years of his artistic career concealing his personality. He wore a bandanna over his face, hid behind dark glasses, and gave interviews only with great reluctance. All in all, he used every means available to him to spread a cloud of anonymity around his person – despite having no particular need to hide from the forces of law and order. Bombing the streets with graffiti is not the most legal activity, but if you restrain yourself from painting graffiti on government property and from insulting the Queen, it’s unlikely that anyone ‘up there’ will be tempted to arrest you. However, let’s leave talk of strategy till later. What we know for sure is that Alec grew up in New York. All other information about Alec’s personal life is gossip by haters or material for fanfics. We’ll have to look into that too. You agree that our aim is to see art in the round? That’s certainly my view. So any knowledge, especially knowledge that people are trying to conceal, is of particular interest to curious people like us.

As is generally the case, when it comes to making money, it does not hurt to be born into the ‘right’ setting. This rule applies to the subject of this text too. Alec grew up in a well-off family, but one, it is only fair to say, that is hard-working. We know almost nothing about his father, but there are rumours he owned a recording studio or a production company. It’s possible that Alec inherited from his father… no, not a mansion on Manhattan, but his love for everything musical, which is why he chose DJ-ing as his second artistic career. Alec’s mother, Alexandra Andon, is a classically educated artist who works in architectural design. Alex says there was always art in his life. He began learning to draw when he was very young – by watching his mother at work. As a teenager, he hung around on the streets, racing his skateboard. He was inspired by the atmosphere of New York’s streets, which bristle with competing drawings and tags by different graffiti gangs. He says street culture was an important influence on his understanding of art. In particular, someone called Dash Shaw, better known by the pseudonym SACE, inspired Alec to take up a paint can himself and start practising on advertising boards. At college Alec studied both art and art business – before deciding to drop out. However, his contact with art was not confined to painting at home and street art outside the home. His brother, Avery Andon, had begun collecting art in the 2000s, buying local art from street artists in New York. In 2017 Avery launched ArtLife, an online platform and gallery, and then in 2019 he confirmed that he was involved in another project, possibly his most productive yet – a PR campaign for his brother, Alec Andon, whose manager he had become.

Alec followed a strategy of mysteriousness and anonymity from his first graffiti excursions to the moment when he revealed he was Avery’s brother, i.e. for just as long as anonymity was needed for the image of the ’problematic’ personality, Mr Monopoly, whom Alec invented immediately after the US was hit by the Great Recession. Alec’s kitsch portraits of pop-culture idols quietly gathered dust without being allowed out of the studio, but Mr Monopoly migrated from Alec’s easel onto the streets and the walls of abandoned buildings and warehouses, onto parking lots and fences. Mr Monopoly is not a new concept but a talisman from the board game of the same name. Here’s an ironic fact: in 2008 Hasbro Inc., the toymaker, teamed up with Universal Pictures in plans to launch a motion picture based on the boardgame. The film was never made – clearly, the nosedive taken by the global economy was no help in the quest for investors to put money into a film about the fight for survival in tabletop capitalism.

But what did Alec do? He gave his fictive character a real prototype, someone called Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff is a phenomenon almost without precedent or analogy in the American economy. Perhaps the closest equivalent to him is Jordan Belfort. Belfort’s story was put on the screen by Scorsese in The Wolf of Wall Street. In the 1960s Madoff founded a company called Madoff Investment Securities, which crashed at the peak of the financial crisis in 2008. It emerged that at no time during the existence of his fund had Madoff actually managed his investors’ assets or carried out transactions with their money. He simply transferred the sums entrusted to him into his personal account. In order to imitate revenue from investments, Madoff paid out sums of money to his clients upon demand. Madoff’s almost genetic need for profit is illustrated by the fact that he managed to set up a monopoly when he was in prison. In the prison shop he bought up all available packs of instant cocoa and then sold them to his fellow prisoners during their daily walks. His example demonstrates the extreme nature of the schemes that could be realized inside the banking and investment system in the US in 2007-2008. Short-sighted financial regulation and the ensuing mortgages crisis led to an unprecedented number of people losing their savings and jobs. Hundreds of thousands of people had to surrender their homes, having no way of paying mortgages which in other circumstances would never have been approved in the first place.

Of course, filling the streets with pictures of the stock-exchange swindler could not by itself have solved the essential problems facing society at that time. The moustached dandy in a tuxedo and a top hat bobbing with impunity (one of Alec’s early works literally showed the powerlessness of the man with the star badge) on waves of money and drinking dirty martinis against a background of miserable headlines from the financial pages might have got you thinking, ‘Why hit a man when he’s already down?’ But the depiction of Mr Monopoly gave people a direct, if unconsoling, indication of the causes of what was happening. Crises are unpleasant, but uncertainty is even worse. The figure of Mr Monopoly got a response from people since it embodied a metaphor of corporate greed and the fraudulent manipulations of the wolves from Wall Street. And yet, while making Mr Monopoly a scapegoat, Alec also tried to find in this character something that elicited compassion. Or at least pity. Every person, he seemed to be saying, bears the burden of sin, and, in the context of the capitalist system, the burden of being tempted by material enticements. The link between economics and religion was documented by Walter Benjamin in Capitalism and Religion (1921), in which Benjamin describes capitalism as a religious cult that has completely subjugated modern society:

Is Mr Monopoly perhaps just a victim? How else can we explain Alec’s purpose in crucifying Mr Monopoly on a cross of dollars?

It’s probable that this subject failed to elicit an empathetic response, so Alec switched to kitsch and post-irony. The assortment of symbols in his pictures expanded to include additional icons from pop culture: enterprising Scrooge McDuck, whose hobby is to dive into heaps of gold coins; Richie Rich, a kid who has everything – and more – after picking up an inheritance; and C. Montgomery Burns, whose job, as far as we may judge, consists of being a billionaire. When you know these brief CVs of the richest fictive characters, the Forbes billionaires list stops seeming like complete fantasy. Far from being hyperbolic fantasies dreamt up by cartoonists, these characters’ psychological portraits and the stories of how they got rich turn out to be narratives of the real lives of a small circle of inhabitants of the earth – narratives that have been given the pop culture treatment. Like any person, they have their unique routines, their lifestyle – one which is informally obligatory given their social status. It may well in fact be that their leisure and amusements are strictly laid down by a confidential code for the elite – who knows? In any case, this is information which Alec clearly possesses: the luxury lifestyle is becoming a typical theme in his work. Flights on private jets, public demonstration of a collection of Rolls Royces and Geländewagens on Beverly Hills, the vainest street in Hollywood, attendance at society events, walks down the red carpet in the company of luxury jewellery, polo and gulf parties at weekends, yachting, shopping, caviaring (meaning: the eating of black caviar in the restaurant of a luxury hotel with a view of the sights of one of the best-fed capitals in Europe), and the depressing annual discussion of ‘In which of our mansions shall we spend the upcoming summer holidays?’

Alec accompanies the activities listed above with repeat images of bags of money and green bits of paper and symbols of currency flying through the air, but these artificial ‘emojis’ scattered all over the place do not make the picture less like reality. Their presence is intended to make the theme more humorous and the characters’ actions harmless and non-serious, as if we are still watching a kids’ cartoon of the kind that’s not intended to trouble our minds. There is certainly a formal resemblance if we focus exclusively on the infantile cartoon vocabulary being used to convey this visual information to us. The problem is that we have become used to identifying images like this with content that is intended to entertain and amuse – the kind of stuff that we’d probably choose when we want to glue ourselves to the screen and temporarily ‘turn off our minds’. But let’s not forget: every joke also contains not just part of a joke but also part of the truth. Truth which makes us uncomfortable, which gets in our way, and which we would prefer not to know. What seems absurdly laughable or even just a joke is to the same extent objectively existing reality, however much we may might call it impossible nonsense. The proportions of joke and truth are barely detectable and cannot be calculated in practice. For art this is the familiar state of uncertainty. For authors and transmitters of messages it is a flexible field of manipulations. For viewers and receivers of the message it is embarrassment and denial. The place of truth and facts has been taken by the kind of irony that is prefixed with ‘post-’ or ‘post-post--’; and instead of a dose of distractive serotine, the trifling jokes and memes give rise to new discussions and point to problem areas. Instead of mocking the strangenesses of the rich, attention is drawn to the gulf between the privileged and all the rest.

Before taking the maxim ‘A person becomes aware of privilege only when he is deprived of it’ as a categorical yet viscously fluid rule, it is worth remembering that post-truth, as well as affecting the nature of the interaction, also extends to every link in this connection. The relevant question is: Is our definition of privilege and wealth actually plausible? Or is our concept perhaps formed by hyperbolic clichés? Clichés that rain down on us from celebrities’ social media and from the accounts of slightly fewer people and slightly more Big Successes. Recently, there has been increasing discussion of the idea of ‘luxury for the poor’ – not to be confused with ‘quiet luxury’, an idea which arose at around about the same time, as if to order. ‘Luxury for the poor’ is what motivates struggling students to spend their only savings on the latest iPhone and unemployed housewives to make impulse purchases of LaMer cream – to become owners of goods for which the poor have insufficient material capital but which are imposed from above in order to imitate possessing this capital. Luxury for the poor paints a seductive picture and realizes a marketing strategy which is sold to the poor through the rich by even richer corporations. The truly wealthy among us prefer not to trumpet that ‘everything’s hunky-dory’ with them. The representation of wealth that we are seeing has nothing to do with the actual lifestyles and preferences of the privileged. Let’s skip the current historical moment, when even the concept of a closed club of ‘quietly wealthy’ has been commercialized and turned into a faceless beige trend that everyone is already fed up with. These are amazing times. As Boris Groys notes in his essay ‘Art and Money’,

Perhaps what we see in Alec’s work should be regarded in the same way? As just another picture that sells objects, activities, and a quality of life that are beyond the pockets of most people? Then this same interpretative method will also have to be applied to the author’s personality, among other things. Making an installation of the privileged lifestyle is becoming an equally important part of Alec’s creative approach and image – an approach which, without undue modesty, he himself evaluates as performance. Cartoons are positioned as post-ironic talismans, and Alec himself is becoming a cartoon in the border space which is living and performing on the Internet. The question that inevitably arises when we look at the evolution of Alec's projects is: Is this activity really intended to criticize the situation of the socio-economic impasse in which society is operating today? It seems that Alec is deliberately fermenting such scepticism by deciding to collaborate with manufacturers of luxury goods, sign limited-edition bottles of 30-year-old whisky, create a record-breakingly expensive customized celebrity Birkin, and, in short, try on for size the very lifestyle that at the beginning of his career he condemned and mocked. When asked whether his actions should be taken seriously or with a pinch of irony, Alec once replied that what he does cannot simply be reduced to criticism of the rich:

It's unlikely that any of the art critics who ask questions and express disbelief check Alec's bank accounts or go rooting around in real estate records in search of discrepancies. That would be pointless and groundless, just like criticizing someone simply because they have access to a different level of wealth from yours. Criticism of capitalism and consumer society is not just a matter of dissatisfaction with the system as such but draws attention to the problems that this system generates and expresses concerns about these problems getting worse due to a failure to resolve them. The complaint is not at all about the level of prosperity that a specific artist can afford but about the fact that his lifestyle and public appearances contradict his statements and concepts, including statements and concepts whose eye-catching quality has helped his work and objects sell successfully. We know of instances of similarly problematic careers where the author’s anti-capitalist message is commodified and, paradoxically, turns into the most capitalist totem imaginable. Sometimes, as in the case of Banksy’s self-destructing Girl with Balloon, even the act of physically destroying the work fails to facilitate reversion to the original intensity of rebellion: the piece of graphic art that was partially passed through a shredder right as it was being auctioned by Sotheby’s made huge news and hugely increased in value as a direct result of its destruction. The Kurt Cobain effect is an alternative version of this paradox from an adjacent creative sector. The difference between these examples and Alec Monopoly is that the latter's commercialization occurred not at the behest of the art market or due to a preceding public reaction but in keeping with Alec's own direct expectations, based on the self-made status of the objects he was producing. As someone has wittily noted, Alec’s pseudo-capitalist paintings are sold for more than 70,000 dollars precisely in order to fund the author’s luxury lifestyle. The key point here is that Alec Monopoly is a self-made, self-created, self-financing project that gets on just fine without attracting the attention of serious art gurus. It fetches high prices in the art market, and at the same time it’s as if it’s outside the art market altogether. Well, in what way is this project not an ideal candidate for universal grumbling?

The market, and the art market in particular, produces contradictions like this but at the same time continues to mark authors as unsuitable just as soon as their work deviates by just one degree into commerce. Andy Warhol is generally regarded as an ideal example of development of an informal art that takes consumer society as its theme and then exploits it using this society’s own methods. ‘Business art is the step that comes after art,’ Warhol said. What he meant was more than just the normalization of the artist’s desire to make money from his work: he was affirming the very process of making money as a new kind, a new form of art. By equating the process of creation of art with production, he advanced the idea that artistic production could also be based on business models and that any opposition to this economic order would look like ridiculous self-sacrifice. However, debates about money, about money in art, and the consumption of art and money existed long before pop art made this topic mainstream.

There is an unspoken rule of contemporary art that says that today you cannot create a work with the potential to go viral that to one degree or another does not allude to existing cultural objects. ‘We work with what we have.’  Alec started by appropriating popular characters from the entertainment industry. He then turned to equally famous images/signs of pop art of the kind that art historians already treat as pop. He found, it has to be said, a witty, not excessively clichéd, but at the same time unforced way of commenting on what is probably the most clichéd, replicated image in art in general. A Warhol-like can of Campbell's soup, the icon capable of rivalling the Mona Lisa in publicity, becomes in Alec's paintings a banal dollar can. Which in a sense is exactly what it is. The de-canning of pop art narratives is a logical continuation of Alec’s programmatic rhetoric in which he is apparently criticizing a society obsessed with, and at the same time therapeutically calmed by, the act of buying and selling. Contradiction is one of the distinctive features of pop art: it extends between this art’s ideological agenda, which criticizes consumer society, and its prevalence, which is unhealthy and intoxicating at the same time. The conceptual contradictoriness of Monopoly’s work, discussed in the last subsection, has successfully built on the paradoxicality characteristic of pop art. Or, to put it another way, Alec tries to imitate this contradictoriness, knowing very well how works by pop art artists consistently fetch top prices at auction. It is believed that Alec’s works sell well and at a high price due to the fact that he knows his target audience and their ability to pay. Yes. But we should notice the language and visual code that he uses to communicate with this audience – and here we again come up against pop art.

Pop art really took off using as its fuel criticism of consumer capitalism more than half a century ago and, as far as we can tell, this continues to be the most frequent source of quotations when talk turns to the free market. Fine art and money have existed side by side for centuries. The Renaissance is an example of the early normalization of the commercial aspect of art. Works such as the Sistine Chapel or the Last Supper, which to this day amaze us with their craftsmanship and investment of labour, were commissioned by the Catholic Church. Religious institutions in general were the main providers of ‘jobs’ for artists because they possessed great power and material resources. No one was embarrassed then, and no one is embarrassed now, that the thrill caused by interaction with the painting was initially extremely functional – in that a certain organization needed to sell Catholicism to viewers/parishioners while also, of course, educating them along the way by narrating the content of the Christian scriptures in allegorical form on the walls of a cathedral.

So, producing commercially for the market is how things have been in art since the days of the titans of the Renaissance. The art market in its current form, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It would not have arisen without the international bourgeoisie, which, gaining strength after the Second World War, began purchasing art during the economic boom of the 60s. Especially American pop art, which, as Thomas Crowe put it, ‘looks like a commodity and sells like a commodity.’ (This is also why the trend for pop art will be with us for a long time. Or until the social order changes.) How did things come to this? In European countries post-war economic difficulties, the post-traumatic fear of a repetition of the humanitarian catastrophe, and a new round of technological development turned the economy’s emphasis from production to consumption. On top of everything else, the old European avant-garde ceased to inspire and instil hope; and on the other hand – or rather, on another continent – young American mass culture with its glossily idyllic picture was flourishing. This picture, previously considered the height of vulgarity (and generally the end of civilization), turned out to be too seductive or at least too intriguing – art started appropriating images of pop culture. First images, and then logic: there was a borrowing of serial methods of producing and organizing art, which brought art closer to the everyday world of equally mass-produced goods. It was at this time that Donald Judd refused to participate in the production of his own minimalist ‘specific objects’, and Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, members of the ‘Independent Group’, used the collage technique, making cars, televisions, objects involving technical innovation, and other material goods the protagonists of their pictures – equal and just as artificial as human figures cut out from magazines. Goods from supermarket shelves were now no longer essential items but totems, insignia that could be used to convey social status; they therefore appeared in works of art slightly less as objects and slightly more as symbolic emblems. This is how the world of consumer capitalism works: the principal motivation for consumption is not the purpose of a particular product but that which differentiates it as a sign from other similar signs. Trademarks, or what we now call brands, activate our desire. The product-as-sign becomes a fetish.

What else can be given the status of a fetish product when it seems that factory products are gradually exhausting themselves? Art. The process of commodification is especially doable when the differences between high and low forms have become so eroded that they can no longer be accommodated in any scheme for borrowing images and subjects. This erasing of distinctions, which was foreshadowed in the 60s in pop art and minimalism, was made manifest in the early 80s, when authors directly equated works of art with products and then set about intensively commodifying art in their projects. Art began to move in the direction that Marcel Duchamp had criticized at the beginning of the century. Duchamp’s  Fountain was a form of rebellion against the capitalist need to work to support oneself in life. This readymade contains many interpretive and historical connotations, but one of the most down-to-earth explanations of how it came into existence is as a way of asserting the right to laziness, an expression of disagreement with the demands of modern society and with the volumes and pace of productivity expected of artists. At a time when commercial galleries and art dealers were relatively rare, this inverted urinal was already an alternative medium, a way to produce art without having to expend large amounts of labour, effort, and time. Despite this, Duchamp recognized, albeit reluctantly, the imminent totality of capitalism and the fact that even the practice of the readymade, something seemingly highly unattractive for the market, is defenceless against being absorbed by the globalized art world.

The readymade, originally intended to frighten off buyers, was integrated into the system, acquiring the status of a commodity on display, a museum object, a luxury item. A symbol of the final triumph of exchange value over practical value. With this, art reached the zenith of ‘commodity fetishism’. During the ‘great moderation’ of the 80s, a new class of the super-wealthy came into existence; this also needed to be ‘supplied’ with art. One of the key figures in this art boom, Charles Saatchi, was the head of an advertising empire and the unofficial patron of the ‘Young British Artists’ (Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin, et al.). To the delight of interested players in the art market, the new rich preferred painting, graphics, and sculpture – genres which had already proved themselves on the market – to the critical forms of conceptual, performance, and site-specific art. But only if this art was dissolved in the world of commodities – for example, like a pair of basketball shoes or plastic cups by Haim Steinbach.

Works of art began to be used as a sign of power and wealth because, in addition to addressing the theme of consumerism, their visuality and representation mimicked luxury goods. This is art objects as glossy advertising souvenirs and luxury goods, with the artist as a celebrity who is the face of his own ‘products’. This was the tactic followed by Jeff Koons when he focussed on creating objects that exist in the space between kitsch merchandising and the pretentiousness of political art. Collectors fighting over glossy marketing memorabilia and luxury items signed by the artist are the realization of Walter Benjamin’s prediction of a capitalist society in which culture compensates for the lost aura of art and the author through the hypnotic spell of commodities and celebrities. Jeff Koons, the stockbroker who decided to swap his financial career for work as an artist (how ridiculous that sounds), made this redefinition of aura as ‘false charm’ not only his subject but also the engine of his artistic career. It is significant that at some point people began saying of Warhol: ‘Buy Warhol’. Not ‘a work by Warhol’, but simply ‘Warhol’. The author, the aura, the brand, the company, the status: the work itself no longer matters; the main thing is that there should be a certificate of authenticity from the factory/workshop. The study of the simulacra that modern society produces and consumes did not end there. After straightforward self-promotion as a replacement for artistic aura had proved its effectiveness, it was replaced with the cult of mass media sensations. Here the pathfinder was another member of the Young British Artists, Damian Hirst. If Koons began by placing trendy objects in his ‘showcases’, Hirst filled his with animals that he cut in half. These objects are no longer so glamorous or shiny; they are less pop but just as newsworthy. Dead carcasses in formaldehyde, swarms of imprisoned flies, and patterns of rainbow Xanax shock viewers with mute thoughts of death, turning them into consumers/buyers. After all, what could be more relevant or in demand than the dichotomy between life and death? This art is provocation; headlines and shocking novelty are what help it sell. The ranking of richest artists consistently demonstrates that this kind of provocation sells very well.

In the 2000s, following another economic crisis, the neoliberal economy led to certain individuals accumulating even more capital; the art market bloomed again. Art, which had anyway never been deprived of attention and money, became even more expensive. In the mid-90s, Koons' work could be purchased for a few thousand bucks; by 2010 his inflatable steel animals were already selling for millions. Artists today are multimillionaires with all the trappings of the celebrities featured on the covers of glamorous magazine covers. The artist is a new member of the elite, given that being an artist in itself means belonging to an elite minority. The artistic value of artists’ works is equated with their fame and financial success. Works of art function as luxury goods addressed to a wealthy and influential but relatively small stratum of society. Art is inseparable from the fashion, media, and investment industries. No wonder that Louis Vuitton and Prada have recently acquired their own private museums.

In a situation where the main art medium is now the market, it is difficult not to succumb to the temptation of idyllic abundance and not to follow the example of Hirst, Murakami, Arsham, and other gilded creators. Alec Monopoly, the hero of this text, has sold out. Should we blame him for this? Does it make sense in general to demand that artists produce global change and to criticize them if they do not? Art becomes politically effective when it is created outside the market, when it is not a commodity. How Alec Monopoly creates is the opposite of this. He produces objects for the market but at the same time operates with political concepts designed, if not to solve the problem, then at least to indicate its existence. In his exhibitions there is both spectacle and consumption but no conflict. This may be disconcerting, but expressing subjective discomfort with what one sees is not criticism’s main function. Is it worth criticizing the specific products that emerge from his hands? For an answer to this question it would be more effective to ask Alec’s customers and clients, but something tells me that no party to the transaction will have any complaint to make. And questions about the future, in which we would rather imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, should be redirected to other respondents who are able and, more importantly, willing to defend Heidegger’s return to the truth of art as a way of discovering the world.