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Flash Art International n°
227 |
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Text von Angela Rosenberg |
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Stock - Market Angela Rosenberg
When the september 11th catastrophe forced the Nasdaq
to close, the stock market and its power over us became more apparent than ever before.
We all held our breaths as if our very own heartbeats had gone missing. One year
later, with prospects for Western economies once again appearing dim, although for
different reasons, there is substantial concern about a second massive slump, he
“double dip,” that has not only brokers and investors shuddering with fear, but also
virtually everyone. What a difference to when Nicholas Leeson’s manipulations
drove the Baring Bank to collapse, at that time, only ten years ago, we looked upon
the stock market as a venue of evil spirits, who with dubious tactics drove the secret
financial forces of the world. What has happened that we now see ourselves as part
of a system that we considered evil and alien to ourselves this short while ago?
The stock market reflects more than the economic
situation of our society. It reacts immediately to political developments, war and
catastrophes, and their economic implications with share rates falling and rising
dramatically. Continuously in flux, the rates bring warm or chilly spells for brokers
and shareholders, whose swift reactions may set forth spectacular developments. This
game as such would be impossible without a deep trust in the economy and their leaders,
and a fundamental belief in economic growth as such. The “new economy” introduced a new quality into
this game, as the speed increased with which companies floated their shares. The
dot-com boom in retrospect appears to have been more of a religious exercise than
a serious business venture, as not so much real but future commodities were traded;
the market expanded from depending on commodities to business ideas, stretching faith
ever further. Making a
fortune appeared as easy as never before, so many
followed the emerging trend and invested their money in new economy shares, following
the omnipresent and ever-changing share prices on television, news tickers, and the
Internet, as if it was their heart or cholesterol rate. The experts’ oracles, from
Alan Greenspan and André Kostolany, to Wim Duisenberg, are still monitored
with ceaseless attention, in an untiring quest for enlightenment, and the hope that
the newly gained information may provide the individual investor with factual insights
to allow him or her to reach greater economic heights, power and value. Yet, it is
no secret, that the transparency of the current economy as reflected in the media
is superficial, and, like in times of war, much of the information is only released
to manipulate the market.
Online trading provided the individual with the
ability to directly take part in the stock market business, avoiding brokers and
middlemen and the cut they take of each transaction. But once the individual has
obtained the sole power over his or her own transactions, he or she also has the
sole responsibility, and at this point the system of beliefs represented by the stock
market requires added attention. The analogy between the art market and the stock
market is obvious. A work of art is a commodity, sold directly to a buyer by a dealer,
who acts as a broker on the artist's behalf. The resulting sale financially benefits
the artist and the dealer. If the purchase was prudent, the buyer will profit not
only from the enjoyment of possessing the piece of art, but also from the increasing
financial and symbolical value.
Nowadays many collectors invest in art as in shares,
studying the artist’s profile like that of a company whose market value increase
in value. Already the language of share traders has entered the realms of the art
business: “blue chip“ artists are a guarantee for a safe and promising investment,
while the profile of a collection is assembled in the manner of a balanced “portfolio.”
Web sites portray the economic success of collecting
art, e.g. artprice.com which claims to be “the world leader in art market information,”
thereby mimicking the look of nasdaq.com. Others, like artnet.com provide information
about art linking collectors with traders.
Marcel Duchamp wrote in a letter to the American
photographer Alfred Stieglitz complaining that “the feeling of the market here is
so disgusting. Painters and paintings go up and down like Wall Street Stock.” Many
artists share Duchamp’s disgust in the art market, and artists like Hans Haacke and
Barbara Kruger were highly critical of the ‘secret marriage’ between art and money,
making exactly this criticism a key issue in their work. Other artists, especially
those linked to Arte Povera and Fluxus, tried to bypass the market by working in
non-commodities work such as performances, happenings, or “dematerialized” conceptual
art, which of course today is traded very successfully. But it was only by the late
1980s that dominant artistic strategies relating to economics tended to affirm or
even embrace the market. Most poignantly, Ashley Bickerton or Jeff Koons emphasized
the congruency of artistic and economic value, of artwork and commodity, of art world
and economy. So, where do the artists who are defining the arts
of the 21st century stand in this matter? It seems that the interest in economics
differs from both critical and affirmative approaches in its playfulness. The artists
do not embrace or criticize the economy, but rather approach it as game, but with
an attitude.
The 1990s have witnessed a development of the stock
market, that promises a share of the worldwide economic growth to anyone, who can
afford it. This quasi-religious belief cannot pass without being questioned, especially
in the context of the recent discourses concerning post-colonialism and globalisation,
or it will end in dreadful cynicism. The stock market is a glittering contemporary
motif, its power adding to its fascination, as its international accessibility and
importance. In 2000, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen originally planned
to establish “Nasdaqforever.com” as a shareholder company, and to invite people to
speculate in the brand, as they had done in many other dot-com companies. The difference
is that Nasdaqforever.com has no inherent economic “content” beyond speculation,
it is a mere projection and confession of faith more than anything else. Condensed
into a painting, Nasdaq Forever (2000) is a highly ambiguous statement, departing
from the notion that real art is for eternity. It raises the question what lasts
longer: art or the new economy? Jacobsen says: “The fraught and failure is of course
a part of the game of investing money, but the basic message is, that capital makes
more capital. It’s not an ironic comment, just a diagnosis of our present society,
and its obsession with money, and furthermore I do not see any alternatives, despite
that it is kind of depressing to think about.” In Frankfurt am Main, the city of the euro, Jakobsen
installed two different stock market curves at the windows of the Dresdner Bank,
referring to the economical success of Dresdner and Deutsche Bank, their immediate
neighbourhood, their competitive relationship as well as their failed attempt to
merge on the market. The curves for Love Affair (2001) were made from reflective
silver foil, referring to the vain architecture of the building itself as well as
to the stripes by Daniel Buren, who had a piece on the next floor.
Swetlana Heger refers to the stock market as a game
for grown up’s, where everything is possible, stays open, becomes absurd, and is
yet real. At the last Berlin art fair she showed Fake (Gold) (2001), at Brahms.Chouakri,
a golden chart on the wall, displaying the worth of gold during one week. Though
which week was not clear, as numbers and dates for orientation were missing, leaving
only an abstract, jagged line, a golden drawing on the wall. As the economy dives
into worldwide recession, this work goes along with the rather pessimistic and pathetic
installation Fake (2001), a candle in the shape of a golden dollar sign, burning
down, leaving nothing behind than smoke and rapidly vanishing warmth. But whose dollars
are dwindling? Is it the few shares the artist has bought with the money she could
make from her art, or is it the common U.S. dollar, the symbol for economical wealth
in our society? Heger is fascinated by the idea that economical facts and share prices
are obsolete even in the moment they are being published, leaving apparently up-to-date
information nothing but historical facts. Definitely not inviting for participation are Andreas
Gursky’s images of stock exchanges, showing anonymous figures in whirling harried
action. Tokyo Stock Exchange (1990), Singapore Stock Exchange (1997), and the Hong
Kong Stock Exchange dyptich are huge arenas for complex mass spectacles. Presenting
these masses and the ornamental value of the individual in the frenzy of a stock
exchange, the images represent not the individual’s intentions, worries, needs, or
responsibilities, but rather today’s technological banking. A force of united commuters,
the human machine keeps the business rolling, no matter what, even with the depressing
and totalitarian quality of mass organisation, evident in most of Gursky’s work.
Also teeming with people but painterly and abstract,
Martin Liebscher’s panorama photos of stock exchanges turn the images of day-to-day
business into dynamic renderings of expressionist quality, thereby producing a helter
skelter version of a Las Vegas gambling mall (Panoramabilder, 2001). Quite in contrast
to this work another piece of his looks more precise: Liebscher’s rendition of a
forward exchange, located in a large office space. In this piece, he has actually
taken up the role of every single person by digitally duplicating himself for his
latest panorama photograph Termingeschäft (2001). Performing every action necessary
to present a convincing full stock-market cast, Liebscher engages in every action
imaginable in the scenario, every one of his dozens of self-portraits is frantically
busy, on the phone, yelling orders, bearing a variety of expressions from excitement
to exhaustion, desperation or on the brink to suicide. The scene refers to Stanislaw
Lem’s futurist story of a man in space, trapped in a time loop, and thereby producing
endless copies of himself, thereby repeating the same event again and again. Another one man stock exchange is to be witnessed
in Sislej Xhafa’s video Stock Exchange (2000), showing a performance in the railway
station of Ljubljana. The artist, a sole performer in a black suit, improvised a
routine of stock-market movements, producing a complete stock market situation, reacting
to the sign board that announces the trains arrivals, departures, track numbers etc.
Also set in a small and strangely neutral stock
market venue, Aernout Mik’s video Middlemen (2001) confronts us not with the economic
reality but with carefully constructed fiction. Actors play the character of the
middlemen, witnessing the last fading twitches of a dying stock exchange, probably
the hours after or before the inevitable ultimate crash. Middlemen employs the hermetic
atmosphere of the stock market as an absurd setting to stage a beautiful ballet of
existential uncertainty in dysfunctional structures of power. “It’s interactive with culture, insofar as stock
markets are a manifestation of the collective unconscious of a capitalist society.”
According to an old stock market lore, the lengths of womens’ hemlines are affected
by the Dow — the worse the market, the more leg is shown. Nancy Paterson’s Stock
Market Skirt (1998) plays with this myth that skirt length is an economic indicator.
She produced a party dress with a hemline that rose and fell according to up-to-the-minute
data provided by computers monitoring the fluctuation of stock prices. Indeed users
could affect the skirt by trading a stock in whatever company her software was tracking
at the moment, and be rewarded with some more delicate skin. Today’s artists are fascinated by the dynamics and
rules of the stock-market, as the stock-market has become an institution of public
interest. Mainly a success of the media coverage in the last couple of years, magazines
and TV shows focusing on economic issues, making them comprehensive and reasonably
transparent, the stock-market has become a crucial character in our popular culture,
like a film star, or a politician the stock-market attracts hopes and fears but also
dreams of wealth and projections of power. These artists playfully transcend the abstract subject matter of the stock market into something that is referential to the individual, with an impact on society. So it is not entirely without sarcasm, that they prove that contemporary art in today’s art market system is not only of a coherent economic value, but of a symbolical value, too. Angela Rosenberg is a critic and art historian based in Berlin. |
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