Episodes one to four of The Masterpiece take place in an imaginary London avant-garde of the 1960s, but in episode five, Nick is transported to the 1980s. We follow him as he grapples with the Bucks Corporation and the relationship between art and finance becoming more blatant. In the installation, the characters were blown up into full-scale cut-out figures. The satirical work draws from films such as Wall Street (1987) and American self-help manuals, while also ironically (in an exhibition sponsored by a beer company) employing the moral tone of the nineteenth-century temperance movement. At the ICA, viewers were able to take a printed newspaper version of the comic away for free. The Road to Ruin presented them with a critique of corporate sponsorship of the arts, in deliberate contrast to the celebratory marketing that surrounded the show.