In 1963 and 1964, Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was working on two related series of objects he called “model” 1,000 Yen-notes and “model” wrapped objects. As he established in his 1964 “Thesis of ‘Capitalist Realism,'” he made these “models” as a method of exposing the contingent legitimacy that mass-produced currency and commodities had as “real things.” This article focuses its analysis on Akasegawa's wrapped furniture installation for Room in Alibi (1963) as a complex demonstration of the ways in which the model could “frame” capitalism's emerging consumer lifestyle object systems. As such, his models can be seen as part of a larger discursive engagement with questions about domestic reality emerging at the conjunction of Neo-Dada, Pop, Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Fluxus in 1963–64. They ran parallel to other experimental models, scores, games, instructions, and demonstrations, which often, and surprisingly consistently, also used domestic furniture and objects (such as Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg's use of model living room sets in Living with Pop—A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism ).

This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the international postwar art movements of Pop, Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Anti-Art. It relates the independent coinage of Capitalist Realism by artists Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner in Germany in May 1963 with that of artist Akasegawa Genpei Japan in February 1964 and argues that they were both part of a broader interest in developing new strategies of artistic realism during the Cold War. The artists' sly and ironic appropriations of consumer objects and advertisements sought to capture the operations of capitalism, not only as an economy, but as an ideology that materially and systemically reproduces itself within everyday life. Relating the Cold War moment to the development of capitalism after the fall of the communist bloc, the introduction ends by addressing the strategic applicability of Capitalist Realist modes to contemporary art in the neoliberal era.