New York Museum of America: Monopoly (game) of gold and diamonds.

8 September, 2011 No Comments

A real estate fiction that holds on to the crisis.

This is a version of the popular board game Monopoly created by the jeweler Sidney Mobell in 1988, ordered by toymaker Hasbro, the company that commercializes the game, and that carries a value of $2 million. This version was not marketed, instead was donated to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, who then lent it to the New York’s Museum of Finance located on Wall Street for a few months, and became the museum’s newest attraction.

No need to explain the dynamics of this game, which we all know and have enjoyed since its inception

The following pieces of the game are made with gold; the board, the street cards, its chips and the dices. The hotels are decorated with sapphires and the houses with rubies on top of the chimneys. The dots on the dices are diamonds, and the famous streets, which could vary depending on which country or city the game was bought, are decorated with diamonds as well as the path from the prison to the parking lot.

There have been many versions of this game, noting the chocolate one made by Neiman Marcus.

 This game is intended to be a representation of the capitalist world we live in and the attractions of wealth accumulation, promoting competition, and the search for the best positions within the real estate market in different locations, and therefore of our society.

The Associated Press video gives a more detailed picture of the Monopoly as a piece of jewelry . 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZTICTJpRnE&feature=player_embedded

A peculiar version of the famous Forbes list ranking billionaires around the world, is the “Fiction Forbes List” which has also had some variations in the last few years; Mr. Monopoly, who had amassed great wealth through real estate speculation and was at the top of the list early in the decade, has disappeared after losing his fortune, swept away by the crisis that hit real estate (subprime mortgages) in the United States. Instead, Uncle Scrooge (Donald Duck), invested his fortune in gold (a safe haven during the financial-real estate crisis) that increased his wealth even more scaling up to the top 5 in the Forbes-fiction list.

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