Alotta Money (French, 1972-2022), born Philippe Fatoux, made surreal crypto art that combined nostalgic, whimsical imagery with modern digital motifs like gifs, memes and visual loops.,,His work often centered on a four-eyed, bowler-hatted character inspired by Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.,
Before turning to crypto art, Fatoux worked in the graphic industry as an e-sport art director, a comic book illustrator, and an illustrator for an ecology and cannabis legalization association.He began making crypto art in 2018, designing Twitter profile pictures for friends before collaborating with other artists as the NFT space emerged.,In 2019 Fatoux collaborated with the artist Trevor Jones on Jones's genesis NFT EthGirl, which sold for 70 ETH, then worth about $10,000 and a record price at the time.,The following year he joined twelve other artists, including Hackatao, Josie Bellini, Matt Kane and XCOPY, on First Supper, a 22-layer programmable artwork minted on Async Art.,Fatoux also made Dictatorship, an Async Art piece whose many layers he could reprogram to change the work daily and weekly, and The Voxel Hotel, an architectural piece he created in Cryptovoxels.He also released the generative series Thousand Headers Coterie on Async Art, remixing classical portraits into surreal, meme-filled Twitter profile headers.
Fatoux and Jones then began EthBoy, a programmatic series that changes with live Bitcoin and Ethereum price data across ten planned chapters. Fatoux worked on its first chapter before he died of cancer on March 4, 2022, a day before what would have been his 50th birthday.,
Fatoux's 2020 work Last Luncheon on the Grass was featured by the Museum of Crypto Art, and in 2022 he was represented in the “24 Seeders” installation of the group exhibition “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich.,After his death, Trevor Jones and MakersPlace organized a 2023 charity exhibition and auction in his honor at Castle Party that raised more than $240,000, with $140,000 donated to the cancer charity Maggie's.
