Steves, who was wearing overalls and a tool belt, dropped by the boardroom table where we were sitting, on the edge of a gallery that would house Oliver Ressler’s piece “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies”—which consists of videos of economists and historians discussing systems like libertarian municipalism and anarchist consensual democracy. She produced a small cardboard box. “Do you know about deal toys?” she asked. “If Morgan Stanley invests in the Olive Garden, then a deal-toy company might be hired to make a Lucite tombstone with little pieces of salad and tomatoes in it that celebrates that deal,” she said. Jasper Waters, an industrial designer, had designed a deal toy for FICTILIS’s project, a monument the size of a paperweight, with a marble base. “Congratulations on the Investment from the United States Department of the Treasury,” it said, above the names of several banks and firms—Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citibank—and the dollar amounts each one received in the 2008 government bailout. Inside the Lucite was a graph of the Dow plummeting. (The Museum of American Finance, on Wall Street, also has a deal-toy collection.)
Menu
Menu
