9 ART, MARKETS, AND FINANCE (2024)

Art, Market and Finance

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, 2020

Art, Market and Finance offers a critical overview of the approaches that inform theorisations and practical applications of art’s relationship to finance. The analysis focuses on the institution of contemporary art and the global financial order, both of which can be said to represent the hegemonic forms of art and finance today. A central question concerns the structural role of the art market system and its institutions as on the one hand places of ‘collision’ between business and critical approaches, and on the other fertile grounds for symbiosis insofar as critical art endows the market with value. While it is often argued that this dynamic attests to the all-encompassing reach of financialisation, it equally points to the limitations of the critical approach in generating positions vis-a-vis finance that transcend the circular feedback between criticality and financialisation as the two only possible ways of conceiving the relationship between art and finance. Thus, the larger ambition of this text is to start sketching a progressive vision for art and finance that departs from the functions that they perform within today’s dominant systems of governance.

Contemporary art and financialization: Two approaches

This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and contemporary art. The first departs from an analysis of how market logics in non-financial spheres are being transformed to facilitate financial circulation; the other considers valuation practices in financial markets (and those related to derivative instruments in particular) from a socio-cultural perspective. According to the first approach, the contemporary art market is in theory a hostile environment for financialization, although new practices are emerging that are increasing its integration with the financial sphere. The second approach identifies socio-cultural similarities between the logics by which value is extracted, amplified, and distributed through derivative instruments and contemporary art. The two approaches present a discrepancy: on the one hand, contemporary art functions as an impediment to outright financialization because of market opacity; on the other, contemporary art represents a socio-cultural analog to derivative instruments. The essay concludes by setting out the terms for a more holistic understanding of contemporary art's relationship to financialization, which would enable an integration of its economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

The derivative condition, an aesthetics of resolution, and the figure of the renegade: A conversation

Finance and Society, 2018

The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well a...

The Derivative Condition. A Poietics of Resolution

2018

Collection of works and texts, mainly 2012-2019.

Financialization as a Medium: Speculative Notes on Post-Blockchain Art

Moneylab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Edited by Inte Gloerich, Patricia De Vries and Geert Lovink. INC Reader #11. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 2018 Free PDF and hard copies at: http://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2018/01/22/out-now-moneylab-reader-2-overcoming-the-hype/

Contemporary art, capitalization and the blockchain: On the autonomy and automation of art’s value

Finance and Society, 2016

This article addresses contemporary art as a means to investigate how, and to what extent, financial logic impacts upon the socio-cultural sphere. Its contribution is twofold: on the one hand, the article shows that contemporary art's valuation practices increasingly reflect the logic of capitalization; on the other hand, it assesses the emancipatory potential of blockchain technology for the cultural sphere. In relation to the latter I argue that, in spite of the technological novelty of blockchain-based art projects, these nonetheless fail to challenge a received logic of finance. This exposes the limitations to technological determinism as a means of countering financial power in the socio-cultural sphere, and points to new problems for art's valuation methods in relation to the liquid logic of algorithmic finance. Article available at: http://financeandsociety.ed.ac.uk/article/view/1724

Speculations: Funding and Financing Non-Profit Art

OnCurating Issue 58, 2024

This issue of OnCurating aims to shed light on the complex and often-times concealed economic basis of art production and exhibition-making. The contributions cover a range of issues from a highly speculative financial model of the art market, public funding mechanisms, and attempts of building alternative economic systems. The compilation of texts are to be read in the context of two key problems related to arts funding. Firstly, the art market’s speculative value creation favours singular artistic production of reification/objectification, emphasises the funding of singular artists, and reaffirms its own hegemonic structure in the light of an economic system of speculation that commodifies with the help of (public) funding bodies and the arts field at large. Secondly, between the state-based public funding paradigms and their complicity or resistance to the reproduction of unequal relations and perpetuation of (neo-)colonial dichotomies through a centre-periphery model. This issue came into being alongside the conference in June 2022 “Speculations on Funding”, generously supported by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) at CAMP Notes on Education, documenta Fifteen in Kassel, Germany. Contributors Tanya Abraham, Laura Alexander, Bassam El Baroni, Poppy Bowers, Kathrin Böhm, Delphine Buysse, Elif Carrier, Antonio Cataldo, Aric Chen, Mame Farma Fall, Isabelle Graw, Alistair Hudson, Jan Jongert /Superuse, Carlijn Kingma, Ronald Kolb, Renzo Martens, Shwetal A. Patel, Dorothee Richter Kuba Szreder, Myriam Vandenbroucke, Marina Vishmidt, Mi You Editors Issue 58 Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel, Dorothee Richter The publication is kindly supported by ProHelvetia.

Renegade Activism and the Artist-as-Collective

Data Loam, 2020

Experience money

2018

Participatory art within, against and beyond financialization: Benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common

Cultural Studies, 2017

This essay examines three critical artists who orchestrate participatory spectacles and experiences as a means of challenging neoliberal financialization, an overarching paradigm and process that is reshaping economics, politics, society and culture. Critical art, I argue, can offer us a particularly insightful vantage point on these transformations. This is not, as it is usually supposed, because art has some lofty transcendental perspective above society; rather, it is precisely because art is already so deeply integrated into finance and financialization. Not coincidentally, "participation" appears as a keyword for the restructuring of both art and finance today, which I argue is key to understanding the challenges, limits and potentials of even avowedly critical participatory art, with lessons for cultural production more broadly. In order to analyse and draw broader lessons from the three artworks in question, I identify each with a strategic paradigm: benign pessimism, tactical parasitism and the encrypted common. These strategies, I argue, emerge within, against and beyond financialization and can help complicate our approach to its complex cultural politics.