A 2014 deconstruction of James McNeill Whistler's 1876 Gilded-Age Peacock Room, Darren Waterston's installation Filthy Lucre captures the persistent, dangerous allure of international trade from the nineteenth century to today. The walls of Waterston's room drip with gold paint, the floors are strewn with the detritus of smashed porcelain, and the shelves that once held ceramic vessels sag under the weight of the history they carried. In a replica of Whistler's painting La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine that hangs on the wall, Waterston covers the face of a kimono-clad woman with a swath of black paint, taking the objectification of the original painting to its extreme by removing any possibility of subjectivity from the woman depicted, while simultaneously creating an unsettling and uncanny picture of the black void of Orientalist desire. Waterston's refracted recreation of the Peacock Room thus offers a visual metaphor for the decay wrought by centuries of inter-imperial violence over global trade—damage still being felt and wrought well into the twenty-first century.

Whistler's original Peacock Room is a gilt-edged, richly saturated composition in blue and gold. Influenced by Asian designs with its intricately drawn peacocks, Whistler's room features walls full of nooks and crannies that eventually displayed his patron Frederick Richards Leyland's extensive collection of blue and white Chinese porcelain. Curator Susan Cross observes that Waterston's piece “manifests visually and physically the ugliness embedded in the story of [the Peacock Room’s] creation”—a story that includes both a contentious dispute between Leyland and Whistler over the direction and scope of the project, and “the commodity culture that Leyland's collecting represents for Waterston” (13). Characterizing Filthy Lucre as “a scab from a wound that will never truly heal,” art historian John Ott suggests that the piece reminds viewers that “we cannot fathom a work of art without also looking at its complex web of economic and social relationships” (114). Though Waterston and his critics focus their attention primarily on the economic relationship between artist and patron, the history of the room's imported Chinese porcelain, as detailed in the previous chapter, makes it impossible to look at this artwork without thinking about the economic relationships between empires that fought to secure favorable trade conditions, as well as the inter-imperial cultural exchange that led to the artistically hybrid blue and white porcelain.