Curator’s Note
Gretchen Andrew: It is a common complaint in the art world that those in the tech industry don’t support art at the scale of their brethren in the finance industry. With the tech industry the place to make a fortune, this is a real problem for the arts and artists.
If we think about the banking and art market shifts that occurred in the 1980s, we see a relationship where capital and culture reached frenzied alliance. Over these past three decades we have also seen instruments of financial trade divorced irrevocably from hard value. We see the rise of flash trading, subprime mortgages packaged” with supposedly better securities and abstracted from homes; Enron trading energy as if oil physically moved like money; and the pre-eminence of derivatives where the directional value isn’t as important as the size of the change. Even in Warren Buffett’s principles of investing may be to the contrary, this is still the market we operate in.