Artist cooperatives were financed through a pyramid scheme using new tenants’ deposits

Evidence

By November 1966, Maciunas identified ten, making down payments with funds supplied by the J. M. Kaplan Foundation. Unfortunately, Kaplan withdrew from his project to support the artist cooperative housing developed in the old Bell Laboratories Building in the West Village neighborhood Jane Jacobs saved from demolition. Still, Maciunas soldiered on, operating a benign, if risky, pyramid scheme in which the cash advanced by prospective tenants was used to make deposits on additional buildings. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1081

Categorization

• SEED: The benign pyramid scheme financing SoHo’s artist co-ops is a vivid, counterintuitive origin story — an article on how the avant-garde scene was literally financed by a financial fraud structure could connect real-estate mechanics to art history.
• XREF: connects to: Cryptocurrency’s engineered scarcity converts success as a currency into a pyramid scheme. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 688