In that way, he created an alternate economy based on an equivalence between money and art: the inherent uselessness of both that makes the value of each arbitrary.
Granted, the rulers of the Friuli region in the Alps, deciding that enough is enough, axed a small department of the local government whose manifest uselessness had become an embarrassment.
Through my experience as a financial planner and a doctor, the people who stop being engaged get old quickly and their brains seem to slip away into uselessness much faster than those who keep working.