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A hand-painted vinyl astronaut built to commemorate a 2022 NFT drop is now Lot 5 at an auction house better known for prints than pop art collectibles.
Alec Monopoly‘s “Spaceman Richie,” a hand-painted cast vinyl sculpture from 2023, is heading to auction as Lot 5 through LLB Auction, the Luxembourg-based contemporary art house whose recent sales have leaned heavily on prints and graphic art. The reply listing for the lot gives the work’s dimensions as 12 by 12 inches, published by Alec Studio, and describes it plainly as a limited edition sculpture. Bidders looking for more detail on the physical object’s condition are directed to email a specialist directly, standard practice for a contemporary edition work where paint finish and handling history can meaningfully affect value.
That 12 by 12 measurement is worth pausing on, because other retail listings for the same edition describe a noticeably different set of dimensions. Several galleries that have sold “Spaceman Richie” figures list the sculpture itself at roughly 12 by 5.9 by 4.5 inches, with a separate branded outer box measuring closer to 13.8 by 8.2 by 7.4 inches. The discrepancy most likely comes down to what’s actually being measured, the standing figure versus its packaging, or a rounded approximation somewhere in between, rather than a different physical object entirely. Either way, it’s the kind of detail a condition report would resolve definitively, which is presumably why the listing points bidders toward one before they commit.
LLB Auction itself is a relatively small player on the international auction circuit, which is worth knowing before reading too much into the lot’s placement. The house has run 18 sales over the past year featuring roughly 156 different artists, generating around $762,554 in total sales across 525 lots of fine and decorative art, a figure that puts it well below the scale of a major international house. More than half of its recent lots have been prints and works on paper rather than sculpture or three-dimensional editions, which makes a hand-painted vinyl figure a slightly unusual inclusion on the house’s typical roster, though far from unheard of given how frequently smaller contemporary houses mix mediums within a single themed sale.
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“Spaceman Richie” isn’t a standalone character. It’s a physical extension of Rags to Richie, Monopoly’s first major Web3 project, a profile picture collection of 6,500 hand-drawn illustrations built around an original figure called Little Richie, rendered in the same board-game-inspired visual language the artist has used across his street art career. The collection launched on July 24, 2022, on MoonPay’s Hypermint platform at 0.5 ETH per mint, and it arrived with a partnership attached to The Sandbox metaverse platform, described at the time as the first pre-mint partnership Sandbox had ever announced for an NFT collection. Holders were promised a digital parcel with a play-to-earn game, an art gallery of Monopoly’s work, live DJ sets from the artist himself, and access to in-person events alongside more than a million dollars in collector prizes.
Alec Monopoly Rags To Richie Astronaut Figurine With Matching Display Box
“Spaceman Richie” translates that digital mascot into a physical object, with the Rags to Richie logo stamped directly onto the figure’s foot. Other retail listings for the edition describe a limited run of 250 sculptures plus 50 artist proofs, priced at roughly $7,650 for an artist proof at original release, sold complete with a hand-signed certificate of authenticity, Alec-branded handling gloves, and packaging deliberately designed to echo Andy Warhol‘s Brillo Box, built to function as a displayable piece of the artwork in its own right rather than disposable shipping material. Whether the specific example crossing the block at LLB Auction is a numbered edition piece or one of the artist proofs isn’t specified in the lot listing itself.
The Warhol reference is doing real work here, not just decorative work. Warhol’s original Brillo Boxes turned a piece of commercial packaging into a fine art object by insisting the container itself carried the same authorial weight as anything inside it, a move that became one of the defining gestures of Pop Art’s engagement with consumer culture. Monopoly borrowing that specific device for a sculpture built around a Web3 mascot draws a fairly direct line between two separate eras of art commenting on money and status: Warhol’s commercial packaging in the 1960s, and an NFT project’s branded merchandise packaging six decades later. Whether that line reads as a genuine continuation of Pop Art’s project or as a knowing wink at it is likely to depend on how seriously a given collector takes NFT-era collectibles as a category in the first place, but the reference itself is clearly deliberate rather than incidental.
The broader category “Spaceman Richie” belongs to, sometimes described in marketing material as phygital art, has become a fairly crowded space since 2021, as artists who built audiences through NFT drops looked for ways to give token holders something to physically own once the initial minting hype cooled. Monopoly’s version of that pivot has the advantage of an existing gallery and auction infrastructure behind it, built over more than a decade of street art and canvas sales, which is not something every NFT-era artist attempting a similar physical translation has had available to lean on.
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Understanding where a $7,650 vinyl figure sits in Alec Monopoly’s broader market means understanding what that market actually looks like. Monopoly, born Alec Andon in 1986, built his reputation on murals and canvases starring Rich Uncle Pennybags, the mustachioed mascot of the Monopoly board game, repurposed across the artist’s work as a stand-in for capitalist excess, frequently pictured clutching a money bag or otherwise draped in conspicuous wealth. He’s expanded that visual language to include Bob Dylan, Patrick Bateman, Scrooge McDuck, and Richie Rich, the wealthy cartoon child whose Harvey Comics origins predate Monopoly’s own career by decades and whose name and iconography clearly inspired the Rags to Richie project’s branding.
His secondary market has been genuinely volatile by contemporary art standards. Canvases traded in a relatively flat $20,000 to $35,000 range through the mid-2010s before the 2020 pandemic-era collecting boom roughly doubled that baseline, pushing works like “Mr. Monopoly” and “Gold Bull” past the $50,000 mark at Heritage. The real outlier came far more recently: a hand-painted Hermès Birkin bag, sold under the title “Skeleton Monopoly Bag,” brought $193,500 at Phillips, a result roughly 275 percent above his previous auction ceiling and a clear signal that Monopoly’s rarest, most object-forward pieces now command prices his flat canvases never approached. Industry observers tracking his gallery sales describe the resulting market as bifurcated: the scarce, novelty-driven pieces set headline records, while his regular paintings continue selling steadily in the five figures, with a reported 77 percent sell-through rate across 2024 and 2025 that’s unusually consistent for a working street artist.
A limited-edition vinyl sculpture tied to a specific NFT drop sits closer to the accessible end of that spectrum than the record-setting one, priced well below his painted canvases and dramatically below the Birkin outlier. But it also carries a different kind of specificity than a repeated Monopoly Man motif. It’s tied to a discrete moment in the artist’s career, his pivot into Web3 collecting during the 2022 NFT boom, which gives it a documentary quality some of his more repeatable painted output doesn’t have.
Monopoly’s own career arc helps explain why that pivot made sense for him specifically. He built his reputation through street art and mural work in cities including Miami and Moscow before galleries like Eden Gallery began giving him formal exhibition space, with recent shows across Eden’s Dubai, Aspen, and Mykonos locations continuing that gallery relationship into 2022 and 2023, the same window in which Rags to Richie launched. An artist whose entire visual project is built around satirizing wealth, celebrity, and speculative markets was always a fairly natural fit for the NFT boom’s own mix of speculation and status signaling, and the Sandbox partnership’s emphasis on live events and club access reads as a direct extension of the exclusivity Monopoly’s paintings have spent years depicting ironically. Whether that irony survives the transition into an actual paid membership product is a separate question, one the artist’s own market doesn’t appear to have penalized him for.
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The lot’s own provenance language is notably spare. Beyond the standard disclaimer that catalog images may not represent the actual work’s condition, and the instruction to request a condition report by email before bidding, there’s no ownership history disclosed, no note on whether this example has been previously exhibited, and no indication of which specific edition number is being sold. That’s not unusual for a contemporary multiple at a mid-size regional auction house, where provenance research tends to be thinner than it would be for a unique painting or an older, more thoroughly documented work, but it does mean prospective bidders are largely working from the same general edition information available through retail galleries rather than anything specific to this individual sculpture.
What the listing does confirm clearly is authorship, medium, and publisher, Alec Studio, which is consistent with how the artist has issued his other sculptural editions. Combined with the well-documented edition size and pricing history from galleries that have sold other numbers from the same run, a bidder has enough external context to gauge whether LLB Auction’s eventual hammer price represents a discount, a premium, or something in between relative to primary market pricing, even without the auction house itself supplying that comparison directly.
There’s also a practical reason thin provenance matters more for this particular object than it might for a painting. A sculpture sold as part of a themed collectible drop, complete with branded packaging, a certificate of authenticity, and accessories like handling gloves, only retains its full value if those components stay together. A collector evaluating this lot would reasonably want to know whether the original box, certificate, and gloves are included alongside the figure itself, since a stripped-down example missing its Brillo Box-style packaging would represent a meaningfully different object from a completeness standpoint than one sold exactly as it left Alec Studio in 2023. The lot description doesn’t specify either way, which puts that question squarely in condition-report territory rather than something a bidder can answer from the catalog listing alone.
That gap is arguably the single most useful piece of information this listing doesn’t volunteer. Limited editions built around accessory-heavy unboxing experiences, a category that includes plenty of designer toy and collectible sculpture releases beyond Monopoly’s own work, tend to see meaningfully different resale outcomes depending on whether the full package survives intact. A specialist condition report is the only way to know which version of “Spaceman Richie” is actually crossing the block, and it’s worth requesting before treating any of the retail comparison prices cited here as a reliable stand-in for what this specific lot is likely to bring.
From the DRIFT archive: The Art of the Can: Chaz Bojórquez’s Hand-Signed MTN Spray Paint Edition
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