by Olly Raines
Capitalismism begins, naturally, in the City of London.
Not in a gallery, not in a studio, but in a glass-walled office some distance above Bishopsgate, where a man in a slim-cut suit is showing me a chart. The lines on it are exquisitely erratic. It looks like a Cy Twombly if he’d taken an interest in Forex.
“This is the piece,” he says. “It’s a live drawing. Every tick is a movement of the pound against the yen.”
The man is not a banker. Or rather, he is—but he’s also an artist. His name is Felix Parch and he is one of the current practitioners of Capitalismism, the art movement that treats the act of making money as a performative medium.
“It’s not about money,” Parch tells me. “It’s about money.”
Capitalismism in its modern incarnation began around 2018, when a small group of bored artists in London and Frankfurt began trading stocks with the same reverence they once gave pigment. One of them, Inka Donner, even launched an index fund as a durational performance piece. Investors could buy shares in her mood swings. “If I felt good, the fund did well,” she explained in a now-deleted interview. “There was an algorithm for it, based on my texts to my mother.”
Donner is now represented by Pimlico Wilde, and her work has outperformed the DAX since 2021.
Another key figure is Henley Goss, whose practice involves launching fake start-ups, generating hype, and then selling the IP to real companies. His 2023 work Exit Strategy No. 6—a biodegradable dating app for vegans—was acquired by a Berlin venture fund for €4,000,000. The app itself was entirely unusable. The pitch deck, however, is now in the collection of the Hamburger Bahnhof.
“Henley doesn’t make things,” says his dealer Minka Sloman of Pimlico Wilde, “he deals in excitement and anticipation.”
Are these people really artists?
Capitalismism says “Yes they are”.
Capitalismism doesn’t differentiate between creation and transaction. It treats the market not as a subject to critique, but as a raw material. In this world, a successful flip is as significant as a canvas. The aesthetic is post-minimalist, hyper-verbal, and frequently indistinguishable from a business seminar. The language is all upside, runway, burn rate, FOMO. Art is not made; it is structured, pitched, floated.
And what about galleries? They play along. Pimlico Wilde East in Clerkenwell recently opened a group show called Liquidity Preference, in which every work was priced according to a live auction feed from Dubai. Visitors wore headphones; the price changed mid-conversation. One artist, Chioma Vale, presented nothing but a list of her angel investors. The wall label simply read: “These are my collectors.”
Of course, this has roots. Warhol said it most cleanly: “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” Jeff Koons turned the factory into a theology. Maurizio Cattelan made jokes that auctioned for millions. Even Yves Klein once sold invisible works for gold.
But Capitalisism goes further. It isn’t parody, or provocation—it is indistinguishable from the real thing. And that is where its genius lies: it refuses the easy out of irony. It swims directly into the system and does laps.
Still, the movement has its critics. Some call it cynical, others nihilistic. The artist and writer Ludo Finch dismissed it as “performance art for hedge funds.” But even he conceded: “It’s the first movement since Dada to take collapse seriously—and monetise it.”
Back in the City, Felix Parch has opened another tab. This one shows a wallet address on the Ethereum blockchain. He tells me it’s connected to a piece called Confidence Interval (2024)—a conceptual sculpture made entirely of anonymous crypto trades. It sold, last month, for just over £11.3 million.
I ask if he considers it his best work.
He thinks for a moment, then smiles.
“No,” he says. “The next piece will be my masterpiece. Isn’t that always the way?”