Fiat Lucrum: Let there be profit | Ten Decrees #02
THE PRINT
30x20 inches, drawn at 18,000 pixels across, which is 600 pixels per inch at this size. A picture with four hundred things happening in it is worth nothing at a resolution that hides three hundred of them, and that's the entire reason I work this big. The detail holds closer than your eye can resolve from across the room. This one has to be walked up to.
Limited edition of 10, signed and numbered, on Hahnemuehle German Etching 310gsm.
The print isn't inside the tube. It's rolled around it and wrapped in Kraft paper and layers of bubble wrap, then boxed with foam protection. If you want a specific edition number, email me before you check out. First asked, first held.
Each includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart.
Bitcoin accepted at checkout.
THE CONCEPT
Fiat is Latin for let it be done. A decree, issued once, with nobody asked. Lucrum is gain, the root of lucrative, and even in Rome it carried the smell of profit taken rather than earned. Fiat Lucrum. Let there be profit. Somebody decreed a gain into existence. The gain was real. It just wasn't theirs, and it wasn't new, and the entire right half of this piece is what that costs.
It's built on Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490 to 1510, still the best-engineered argument in Western art: paradise on the left, the party in the middle, the price on the right. Bosch made the temptation beautiful so the judgment would land. I kept his structure and made it about the money.
What Bosch never had is plumbing. Water runs this whole canvas. It starts clean in the mountains, pours out of a machine in Eden, and gathers in a basin with an inspection window cut into its wall, fish visible behind the glass. Somebody built a viewing port into the reservoir. Sound money is auditable. You don't have to trust it. You can look.
Downstream, in the middle of the lake, a glass-domed tank on a brass pedestal. Its rim reads FRESH LIQUIDITY. Its bowl reads BOTTOMLESS. Eight people inside are having the party of their lives, and the floor is leaking. Orange fluid gushes from the base, spreads across the lake, drops over the falls, and past that the water is gone and where it's gone there's fire. The valve that controls the flow is bolted to the outside of the dome. Nobody at the party can reach it. Monetary policy is set outside the tank by people who aren't wet. That's the Cantillon effect, drawn. New money isn't neutral, because it doesn't arrive everywhere at once. Whoever stands nearest the tap drinks clean.
At dead center, a ring of fire on the ground with a field of crumpled dollars inside it, and standing in the money, one animal with two heads, a bear's and a bull's, and one rider between them. Same body, same owner. Whichever way it runs, the house takes the spread. A market denominated in something that burns doesn't have an up.
The hell on the right isn't demons and pitchforks. It's the financial system. Four money presses lettered QE-1, QE-2, QE-3 and QE-∞, fed by a jerrycan stenciled DEBT and wired to three piggy banks named SAVINGS, PENSION and NEST EGG. NEST EGG is cracked open and empty. A furnace the size of a house, cast with the words VALUE INCINERATOR. A broker with a rabbit's skull and a $ on it, selling 3X CROSS LEVERAGE across a desk, and hung from the front of that desk, hand-lettered: genius, we print, you pay, have a nice day. Four lines. That's the whole fiat system, and it's the easiest thing in the piece to walk past.
Past the smoke, a cruise ship with every light on, passing a burning coast at cruising speed. It isn't evacuating anyone. It's on a cruise. Weimar had nightclubs. The people closest to the printer don't suffer a debasement. They have the best years of their lives, in sight of the fire.
More than fifty lettered objects. BATCH 13 on a skull kept alive in a jar in paradise (the Federal Reserve Act, December 23, 1913). KEEP DANCING on a music box the dollar winds (Chuck Prince, Citigroup, July 2007). HAL FINNEY on a cryonic dewar in Eden, the only grave in the piece that isn't a punishment. The Bitcoin issuance schedule, 50 BTC down to 21,000,000, laid across the sky as airships and towers. NO CRYING IN THE CASINO. You'll still be finding new sentences in this thing in year three.
The mark is on both sides. The buyer at the leverage desk wears the ₿. The woman signing the MORTGAGE wears it. The crowd cheering a $ on a stick under an ETF placard wears it. Bosch drew his own neighbors into the center panel. I drew mine. And one man walks the incinerator floor unhurried, a lit lighter in one hand and a bag of cash stenciled BURN BAG in the other. He isn't printing it and he isn't signing for it. He's burning it.
Every mask in this piece was drawn by hand, hundreds of them, and every ₿ on every brow was placed one at a time. Crafted, not generated.
The full walkthrough, object by object, is in the Fiat Lucrum essay.
Better money, better world. Stay upstream.
TEN DECREES
Ten of the most crowded and most furious paintings Bosch and Bruegel ever made, redrawn for the fiat age. One every two weeks, from August 29th to January 3rd, the Genesis Block anniversary. Nine of the titles are orders. The last one is ours. Better money, better world.
