THEY OWN THE PLACE

Inside Story

BEFORE THE MONOPOLY MEN

The business of America

CALVIN COOLIDGE

In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge said,

"The chief business of the American people is business."

But in the same speech he warned against making wealth the ultimate purpose of life.

BACK TO THE FUTURE - 2009

In 2009, Senator Dick Durbin was fighting for legislation that would let bankruptcy judges modify mortgages for homeowners facing foreclosure. The banking industry fought it. The measure failed.

Durbin said the banks were still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill, and that they 'frankly own the place.'

There it was.

They Own the Place.

AN OLD PHRASE STAYED WITH ME

Masters of the Universe

Years earlier, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities had lodged a phrase in my head. Sherman McCoy, the Wall Street bond trader at the center of the novel, thinks of himself as a 'Master of the Universe.'

That world of money, status and entitlement stayed with me. Later, after the financial collapse, the phrase felt less like satire and more like an attitude I recognized.

They weren't gods.

But they behaved as though the world

belonged to them.

Same body. Different faces.

MR. MONOPOLY

I began changing the face while leaving the body almost untouched.

Angry. Smiling. Worried. Hidden behind dark glasses. Different personalities occupying the same symbol of wealth.

Human sacrifice to the demi-gods

THE FREE MARKET TEMPLE

The New York Stock Exchange became a temple. The Monopoly men took their places above it. Beneath them, money bags and human skulls fell together.

WE CAN NO LONGER ACCEPT HUMAN SACRIFICE

TO THE DEMI-GODS OF THE FREE MARKET TEMPLE

'Demi-gods' carried a little pun for me - the grandiosity of the masters of

the universe shading toward demagoguery.

THEN THE ARTWORK LEFT THE STUDIO

Occupy Wall Street

One side carried the free-market temple. Turn it over and the corporate logos and chained figures appeared beneath: THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE BROUGHT TO YOU BY...

The protest piece had no dead backside.

They got out of the picture.

THE TURN

The little men had been

standing on a balcony.

Now they stood in the room.

Nearly human-size. Flat, but physical. Different faces.

Money bags at their feet. The image had become an occupation.

THEY OWN THE PLACE.

REPETITION BECAME THE LANGUAGE

A system, not one villain

One figure can be a caricature. Repetition turns him into a class.

The men become the stripes. Money bags take the field. The joke starts to feel structural.

From the street back into the gallery

THE WORK KEPT TRAVELING

In 2016, the earlier Stock Exchange image

appeared in The New York Times in connection

with America on Fire: A Politically Incorrect Show

at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton.

The image had gone from

studio to street to gallery.

The Secretary of the Treasury came to stay.

CAMPFIRE STORY

Years later, Jack Lew, who had served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Obama, stayed at the Art House with his wife.

I thought it would be funny to give him one of the money bags from They Own the Place for his desk. He laughed, but told me he couldn't accept a gift - not one thing.

Instead, he took a dollar bill from his pocket, wrote a message to Rosalind and me, slipped it into a little envelope, and gave it to us.

I tried to give the Secretary of the Treasury a money bag.

He gave me a dollar.

THEY OWN THE PLACE

Different faces. Same costume.

A joke becomes a crowd.

The crowd becomes a system.

And then they step into the room.