THE PRINT
30 x 20 inches, drawn at 18,000 pixels across, which is 600 pixels per inch at this size. 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 Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm.
It ships rolled around the outside of a rigid core, 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. Moria is folly. It's Erasmus's word: in 1511 he published Moriae Encomium, The Praise of Folly, where Folly herself gets up in front of everybody and praises herself for keeping the whole world going.
Folly needs company to work, and so does a money nobody can redeem. Fiat Moria. Let there be folly: a currency that only holds up as long as everybody agrees not to look at it too closely.
It's built on Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs, painted in 1559: one village where more than a hundred proverbs are acted out at once. People bang their heads against walls, fill in the well after the calf has drowned and hold candles to the devil. The painting's old title was The Blue Cloak, or The Folly of the World. Mine keeps the village, and the people running it are skulls with a $ on them.
In the middle, a banner hangs a $ world upside down, under a blackletter plaque that reads Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. On the stage below it, a smiling young woman pulls a blue cloak over an old man's eyes, and the hood says CPI. The plate under the stage spells it out: PULLING THE BLUE CLOAK OVER THE EYES.
Next door stands the church of credit. The arch over its horned $ idol reads CREDO, I believe, from the same Latin verb that gave us credit, and it rests on two pillars, DEBT and FEAR. A young man kneels in front of the idol holding up a tax form, under a brass plate that asks SOURCE OF FUNDS? Just below, past vault doors lettered WE PRINT and YOU PAY, a banker in a brown suit bows with a lit candle.
The shelves above the square keep the 2008 crisis on file, from SUBPRIME: "CONTAINED", 28 MARCH 2007 to PRIVATE GAINS over PUBLIC LOSSES, with a crate of manure stamped AAA RATED, a BANK OWNED shed and a dome lettered LEHMAN BROTHERS, EST. 1850, FAILED 2008. Down in the fountain, a sack marked TARP $700 BN is going under. That's Bruegel's well, filled in after the calf has already drowned.
Under a vat lettered DEBASED, the bills pour into a PUBLIC TROUGH where the pigs eat. A worker holds his SAVINGS in a sieve while it all runs out into a pot marked INFLATION TAX. Bruegel's barber shaves the fool without lather. Mine is a $ skull who skipped the razor and went straight to the blush, on a platform lettered TAKE IT AT FACE VALUE.
Plenty of the masked are in on it too: the runners chained at the fountain, and the courtier on the stairs throwing his coins into the water. Seeing the trick and walking away from it are two different things.
Down by the river, the fish food board has 4000 crossed out, then 2000, and now it says 1000 SATS. Priced in a money nobody can print, things get cheaper.
Some of it only shows up once you're close, like the white paper pinned to a wall under a roof tiled with Bitcoin, or the runner with 6.15 on his chest holding up a brass key.
The world wants to be deceived. You don't have to be.
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.
