Alotta Money was a French pioneering crypto artist and "NFT Machine" who produced a wide range of digital art and loved to explore all kinds of virtual and augmented realities. His work was often a trippy mixture of anarchic, cyberdelic, nonsensical, and humorously subversive art. He was perhaps best known for his Twitter banners art and his classical paintings profanations. His work can be found on many of the major crypto art platforms out there today and he was also a renowned architect and designer within the metaverse.

Alotta Money was born in Buenos Aires. His roots run deep in the crypto Art community. He was one of the first artists to tokenize his work, making him a pioneer in the space. His artwork is detailed, playful, and beautiful.

Alotta Money passed away from cancer in March 2022.^[18]

Profile

Alotta Money's artworks are like cyberdelic pills mixed with cryptocurrency anarcho propaganda; triple dipped in nonsense. Collages, Machinimas, Animations and Videos. Currently in a brand new but non-exclusive love affair with AI.

Alotta Money’s body of work had serious depth and range. His tokens took a defiant and anarchistic look at the establishment from well-known masterpieces to Fiat currency. Whether it’s taped bananas or overzealous money printing, pretty much anything was fair game for this pioneer artist.^[1][2]

The Edible Boomerang Effect

Bananas are a treat for most primates, not just in Miami. Collage, JPEG, 297Ko, 871x1200pixels.

In a stab at traditional art, Alotta Money casts Mona Lisa as a banana, complete with a roll of duct tape in her left hand. The background of the Mona Lisa has been changed to show Miami Beach, which is ground zero for the famous banana taping incident.^[3]

Speed Of Thought

"Fast can be good. Except when moving so fast and getting so far ahead of ourselves we no longer can recognize our mode of transportation or the wall we’ve hit prior to creating it". Animated Collage, GIF, 14.8Mo, 800x642pixels.

In Speed of Thought which was minted on December 7th, 2019^[4] we see Alotta Money turning Whistler’s Mother into a crash test dummy wearing a "Hello Kitty" helmet. Behind the curtain, we can see a Microsoft symbol on a window with a familiar view, which is likely not a statement for anything, but simply more nonsense. This piece screams defiance against traditional art and it’s what we’ve come to expect from this digital art pioneer.

François Dernier

It is the privilege of artists and kings to talk nonsense, and have their nonsense respected. Animated Collage, GIF 27.9Mo 794x1000pixels.

Minted on November 22, 2019, François Dernier represents a unique opportunity for digital art collectors interested in Alotta Money, not only because it’s his first token, but also because it appears to be the only one in which his name is signed so visibly on the artwork.

The mention of the word "nonsense" in the description of this early work is also notable because his style never moved away from adding random elements or, well, nonsense, to his digital artwork. The fact that his earliest work looks exactly like something we’d expect him to produce today makes collecting it that much more exciting.

Naked Dollar - AR Layer

This is the reality of the Dollar, only visible through augmented reality when scanning a $1 bill with the Artivive app (iOS, Android) Animated GIF, 45.1Mo, 1000x423pixels.

Looking for more nonsense? Better keep scrolling. Naked Dollar - AR Layer forces us to take a hard look at the mechanics of fiat currency and the sacrifices made in order to keep the image of the US dollar strong. Somewhere between the printing press and the vast graveyard explored by this token minted on December 11th, 2019 we get the sense that Alotta Money prefers hard money.

For collectors, this token is of special importance as it’s the first attack-by-art from Alotta Money on the US dollar, likely with more to come. Bitcoin fixes This is a very different piece but a similar statement is being made.

Overview

Alotta Money was perhaps best known for his unique memes and the Twitter banner art that he made for John McAfee’s presidential campaign. Alotta was a fan of sci-fi and a renowned architect within the Cryptovoxels metaverse, creating many of the most amazing buildings within the metaverse including the Rose Nexus, the Rendar Gallery, the Scarlet Factory, and many more. His body of work was extensive and shows a wide variety of influences from Disney cartoon characters through to Old master paintings by artists like Holbein, Van Eyck, and Velasquez. He often liked to take an iconic painting and turn it into a comic moving image, satirizing the characters within it and playing with the viewer’s response. His work is full of visual puns, pokes fun at history, and received art historical narratives. His work can be found on many of the major crypto art platforms out there today and now for the first time, it can also be found on Cryptograph.^[5]

Alotta’s Cryptograph

Alotta Money’s Cryptograph depicts the front cover of a comic that he invented called "Weird Economy". The central part of the artwork depicts a superhero-like character called "Vitalika" standing up to what appears to be a cyborg military man who is calling Vitalika a shitcoiner and threatening him with drones. His Cryptograph is full of humor, and meaning, and is rich with crypto imagery and symbolism referencing things like Pump and Dump, Whitepapers, Forks, Bitcoin, and DeFi. His artwork was playing on both people’s ignorance about crypto and blockchain technology and also on many of the strongly held views that people who do know a lot about this technology currently have.^[6]