Art and Banking

An interesting story showing the parallels. From Rachel Cohen writing at The Believer:

Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering
In 2007, with financial markets ballooning on every side, the artist Damien Hirst cast a real human skull in platinum, encrusted the cast with 8,601 diamonds that might or might not have come from �conflict-conscious� sources, and called his construction For the Love of God. Images of the macabre object circulated with incredible speed, and there was cheery debate about whether the accomplishment of the work was in the realm of aesthetics or that of the market, whether what mattered were the artist�s choices or the fact that the piece had lived up to its announced intention to be �the most expensive piece of art by a living artist� and had sold for $100 million. Two years later, with financial markets imploding on every side, it was reported that the work had in fact been sold to a holding company that turned out to consist of Hirst�s gallerist, his business manager, his friend the Russian billionaire art collector Viktor Pinchuk, and Hirst himself. There were then those who, staring at their own newly empty stock portfolios, found in the title apt expression of their feelings. The work itself, with its diamond-laden eye sockets and its original inhabitant�s grinning teeth, seems unperturbed by any hollowness of value in the financial or art markets. It does not matter to this cynical epitome of our glittering age whether it was made for the love of anything but more zeroes.

She talks about art prices for prices sake and goes on to this:

Lately, I find that I read the financial news with the constant sense of sleight of hand at work. Since 2008, and the crisis of mismanagement that resulted in the failure of Lehman Brothers and precipitated our current financial woes, it has seemed to me that the business of all the large financial institutions�even the ones that conspicuously did not fail, like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase�has something important in common with the sale of Hirst�s diamond-encrusted skull. All of these institutions have, or had, significant interests in financial products like derivatives and mortgage-backed securities. These products, or �instruments,� or �vehicles,� are anchored not to any concrete goods but only to finance itself. It was in this way that, in 2010, during the midst of the financial crisis, the gross domestic product of the entire world was between $50 and $60 trillion, while the volume of derivatives trading was about twenty times the size of the GDP�$1,200 trillion, or $1.2 quadrillion.

And Hirst himself sums up the problem:

Or, as Hirst himself put it in an interview with the Daily Telegraph last year, �We�re here for a good time, not a long time.�

Excellent read -- Rachel goes into the history of banking and art collection and the close ties between the two. A fun ramble. One point of interest -- she mentioned the "Father of the Fed" Paul Warburg and I was wondering if he was any inspiration for Little Orphan Annie character, Oliver 'Daddy' Warbucks. He was.