Tools and Tactics of Representation
Historically, a range of artistic media have served as the tools of representation. These have included sculpture, painting, printing, performance, and, more recently, film and installation. Beyond the medium, the actual tools that cultural producers use–chisels, paint brushes, props, lighting, cameras, etc.–have also played a critical role in what a cultural producer is able to create. They are also informed by the substrate–the stone, canvas, film, stage, etc.–that holds the work. Throughout history, these elements have combined to play a critical role in how wealth is represented. This has taken the form of portraiture of wealthy men, women, and families, the construction of lavish estates decorated with artwork and fine furniture, and via patronage of events, productions, and celebrations that situate the wealthy figure as patron–sometimes to the point of naming the place where these cultural events occur.
While these traditional means of representing wealth continue, the digital age has ushered in a wide range of new media, tools, tactics, and preferences. On one hand, digital media platforms offer a means of showcasing wealth to a much wider group of people–many of whom may not be close friends or members of the elite social circles to which the person representing their wealth belongs. In many ways, these platforms have replaced the glossy magazines that dominated the field for the previous generation. On the other, the wealthy are showcasing their status via new physical objects and enterprises. While yachts have always been of interest to the elite, they have taken on a new scale and function amongst a cohort of global elite. They are joined by jets and luxury cars that ferry members to a range of luxurious homes designed, in some cases, by a new class of star architects. At the same time, they individuals are investing in a wide range of new enterprises such as space exploration or new sources of energy that only those with astronomically large fortunes can pursue.
These media are joined by a number of tactics that have been developed both to represent wealth and to preserve it. These have included a vast network of attorneys and corporations that are used to insulate the wealth from visibility and liability. They extend to a broad support system of private chefs, childcare staff, home caretakers, landscapers, security personnel, and personal assistants that ensure their lives are both frictionless and adhere to the exact level of privacy that the principal desires. This approach may extend to the clothing worn by the wealthy and the way it both quietly showcases their wealth while also ensuring that they do not attract undue attention. Altogether, these tools and tactics form a very sophisticated system that preserves and insulates the wealthy while also ensuring that they remain apart from the broader world that, in many cases, was the source of that wealth. Understanding this system can play a critical role in both challenging its dominance while also creating new routes by which wealth can be mobilized and made to function in a manner that elevates both cultural production and society as a whole.
Research and White Papers
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Much of the work at OurThings intersects with this inquiry by revealing and reimagining the hidden systems that sustain value within domestic life. Where the invisible machine of wealth preservation relies on opacity and insulation, OurThings seeks to build a transparent, intelligent infrastructure that helps individuals understand, manage, and preserve the material and cultural assets of the home. By developing a Large World Model for Domestic Life—capable of mapping objects, spaces, services, and their interdependencies—OurThings makes visible the kinds of logistical and operational systems once reserved for the elite. In doing so, it democratizes many of the same tools that have long sustained wealth behind closed doors: inventory management, estate planning, preservation, and maintenance. Rather than serving secrecy, these systems are reoriented toward access, continuity, and stewardship—empowering more people to care for their environments, sustain cultural value, and participate in wealth creation grounded in knowledge, transparency, and care. The following showcase some of this work:
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This line of research is effectively a critique of the current state of the image economy as it plays out on a range of digital platforms. This includes software that supports the production of images (both still and moving), hardware that supports these platforms and that facilitates rendering, large language models that can generate images, and social media platforms that provide a place to share and sell these images–as well as adjacent products. In looking at these platforms, we are both concerned with their underlying structure and biases as well as how they contribute to the representation of values, aspirations, and wealth. In many cases, these platforms flatten reality in order to drive desire and sales of products and services. The result is a relationship to wealth predicated on an illusion rather than on a direct connection to the material, familial, social, historical, and political way in which wealth is constructed and maintained. Ideally, this inquiry will help to illuminate a better way of constructing and utilizing such platforms to support a more constructive relationship to wealth.
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As the culture industry has evolved and expanded, the range, scale, and quality of the output of that industry have been transformed. Star architects build elaborate visions that redefine what space can be, artists outsource the fabrication of extremely intricate and costly artworks, and events have become increasingly expensive and elaborate. The wealthy covet these objects as a means of showcasing their status. They also yearn to live within these spaces and in proximity to powerful and valuable works of art. With this line of research, we look at both the range of objects, what drive desire for one over another, and the broader consequences for artists, the stewardship of these objects, and their relationship to a broader public.
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Beneath the visible markers of affluence—art collections, estates, and philanthropic foundations—exists a vast and largely invisible machinery that sustains, protects, and multiplies wealth. This infrastructure includes the intricate legal and financial networks that structure ownership and control: family offices, trusts, holding companies, tax shelters, and cross-border entities designed to obscure flows of capital and shield assets from liability or public scrutiny. It also includes the sophisticated logistical and operational systems that support elite life, ranging from private aviation and estate management services to data security and reputation management. Equally essential to this system is a vast, often overlooked labor force—personal assistants, chefs, security teams, childcare professionals, and maintenance staff—whose work maintains the seamlessness and privacy upon which elite lifestyles depend. Together, these legal, logistical, and human layers create an ecosystem of invisibility, ensuring that wealth remains both protected and performative, concealed yet constantly sustained. Understanding this invisible machine is crucial not only for revealing how wealth operates today, but also for envisioning alternative structures that balance privacy with accountability and exclusivity with collective benefit. By examining the systems that insulate wealth, we can begin to identify pathways for redirecting its capacity toward more transparent, sustainable, and socially productive ends.
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Money has always been both a medium of exchange and a narrative of trust—a collective agreement about what holds value and why. In recent decades, that narrative has been rewritten through the emergence of digital currencies, blockchain technologies, and new systems of tokenized ownership. What began as an effort to decentralize financial power and expand access to capital has evolved into a complex and often contradictory ecosystem, where innovation, speculation, and ideology converge.
This line of research explores how crypto, NFTs, meme coins, and the tokenization of physical and cultural assets are reshaping the concept of wealth itself. It considers how these technologies enable fractional ownership of real estate, artworks, and other traditionally illiquid assets, effectively transforming them into tradable data objects. While this promises to broaden participation and liquidity, it also introduces volatility, opacity, and moral hazard—especially as non-accredited investors are drawn into markets that blend cultural enthusiasm with high financial risk.
Beyond questions of regulation or speculation, these developments mark a profound shift in how value is represented and perceived. Digital tokens and NFTs function not just as financial instruments but as social and aesthetic statements—symbols of belonging, status, and identity in online and offline communities alike. Examining these new forms of money through historical, cultural, and ethical lenses offers a way to understand how the architecture of wealth is changing—and to ask what kind of financial and cultural systems we wish to sustain as value becomes ever more fluid, distributed, and performative.
Call to Action
The tools and tactics through which wealth is represented—its media, materials, performances, and systems of concealment—form one of the most powerful cultural architectures of our time. Understanding how these mechanisms evolve, and how they continue to shape perception, access, and belonging, requires an interdisciplinary effort.
This research invites collaboration from scholars, curators, artists, technologists, economists, and legal experts who can illuminate the visible and invisible dimensions of wealth’s representation. We seek data, archives, and case studies that trace how new technologies, global markets, and cultural systems influence both the aesthetics and ethics of wealth today.
By bringing together those who study how wealth is shown and those who understand how it is structured, we can begin to map a more complete picture of power and value in the contemporary world—and perhaps outline new ways for cultural representation to serve a broader social purpose.
