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Mediaspace
For the first time Wand 5 e.V. was announcing an open competition to select the media-space 09 curatorteam. There were no limitations on the means of implementation. The purpose of this open competition was to establish a new experimental space - an >open space< in which artists can perform. (>> more) -
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D.I.Y. - The artist as model of the crisis
My favorite example of our topic the role of artist Damien Hirst in regards of the crisis got a new contribution by a today’s SZ (Süddeutsche Zeitung) article. While the ‘hardcover copy’ of the newspaper titles ‘Mach’s doch selbst’ Daminen Hirst: Der Künstler als Leitbild der Krise the internet version reads as following:
Kunst und Krise / Mal gewinnt man, mal verlieren die anderen
Damien Hirst wusste schon die florierende Wirtschaft zu nutzen - nun meistert er ihr Scheitern. Der Künstler als Leitbild der Krise.
Artist and crisis / At times one wins, at times others loose
Damien Hirst knew how to use the flourishing economy - now he masters its failure. The artist as model of the crisis.
>>> just quickly posting the link (german only / here a private english translation pdf can be found
… more to follow
asymptote NYSE
Almost exactly five years ago time.com started a review on the 1999 asymptote NYSE cyber project with these lines:
We live in an era that puts little stock in stability. Solidity and permanence read as rigidity and torpor. The future will be only more unruly, tossed and pulled by disparate forces like a piece of bread among sea gulls. So where does this leave architects, whose work is all about permanence? Buildings are supposed to be hefty, purposeful and unyielding. How can you create structures that embody a quicksilver society when they have to stand still?
ARCHITECTS DESIGN IN CYBERSPACE AND REAL SPACE FOR THE NYSE
ASYMPTOTE PROJECTS
Next Phase: Asymptote 3.0
Beautiful Inside My Bank Account Forever…
I tried to put together some articles which give an outline for the Damien Hirst auction in September, which fell together with the first days of the financial crisis. (During the weekend of September 13–14, Lehman Brothers declared bankcruptcy, auction was held on the 16th .. btw they had some early Hirsts in their collection..)
Aside from this eventually interesting fact one can definitly state, that Hirst’s idea about making ‘the art market more democratic’ eventually did not have any major effect.
“Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” his one-artist, two-day auction at Sotheby’s.
In a move that some say has the potential to change the face of art dealing, Mr. Hirst has cut out his dealers — the New York-based Gagosian Gallery and the White Cube in London — and taken his work straight to auction.
Damien Hirst’s Next Sensation: Thinking Outside the Dealer
Damien Hirst sets new auction record with ‘Investment Banker in Formaldehyde’
Damien Hirst: Beautiful Inside My Bank Account Forever…
Markets Slide, But Hirst Auction Breaks Records
Peter Aspden, an arts writer for the Financial Times, said the exhibition sales are “evidence that there are those who are insulated from the real world.” The superwealthy buyers who are attracted to a sale are not likely to be affected by the fiscal circumstances of the past few months, he said.
.. and as he needs it so desperately:
Damien Hirst X Levis Fall 2008 Spin Denim Auction
WSJ: Sign of the Times: National Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits
From the Wall Street Journal
Sign of the Times: National Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits
The national debt clock, the unofficial tracker of the federal deficit maintained by the Durst Organization in New York, has reached its limits. Last month, as the national debt exceeded $10 trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
The dollar sign in the clock had to be deleted and replaced with a one to record the massive number. The clock’s owners say a new model — with space for two extra digits — will be in place early next year.
Now the debt clock will be able to reach the quadrillions. Hopefully, that’s not a level that will be breached any time soon. –Phil Izzo
AFP: Rolexes fly off the shelves as Icelanders seek safe investments
Speaking of materiality, here’s a story from AFP / Google News:
Rolexes fly off the shelves as Icelanders seek safe investments
Oct 16, 2008
REYKJAVIK (AFP) — As Icelanders suddenly find themselves in the eye of the global financial storm many are seeking stability and solace in luxury goods like Rolex watches, which unlike their plunging currency are unlikely to devalue.
As Iceland in recent weeks has teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, Frank Michelsen, the Nordic country’s only Rolex vendor, says he has seen a “significant increase” in sales.
He refuses however to reveal his figures for fear of being accused of taking advantage of the crisis.
“Customers want something they can hold in their hands,” Michelsen told AFP.
“They don’t trust figures on computers because they’ve already seen these figures vanish just like smoke,” he said.
[…]
Algorithmic stock trading
Forget the movie Wall Street and its stereotypes of wonderboy stock traders. Algorithmically assisted or fully automated algo-trading is making it increasingly impossible for traders to make a killing in the market. Some analysts worry that algo-trading is making markets more volatile, others think it contributes to market liquidity and transparency. One way or the other, the trader bots are not going away…
From Wikipedia: Algorithmic trading:
In electronic financial markets, algorithmic trading or automated trading, also known as algo trading, black-box trading, or robo trading, is the use of computer programs for entering trading orders with the computer algorithm deciding on certain aspects of the order such as the timing, price, or even the final quantity of the order. It is widely used by hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and other institutional traders to divide up a large trade into several smaller trades in order to manage market impact, opportunity cost, and risk.[1] It is also used by hedge funds and similar traders to make the decision to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are even aware of the information.
A third of all EU and US stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC. By 2010, that figure will reach 50 percent, according to Aite.[2]
stocks on ‘morning after’
Though I know that Burak has a smart money screenshot on his blog of the more red looking day of the recent period I thought it would be an interesting addition to show one of today’s ‘morning after’. (.. linked now ..).
The Map of the Market. (’Map of the Market’ is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg>> description)
Just one of today’s headlines:
Wall Street rally buoys Asian markets but Europe slips
cartoon promoting the stock market, 1952
My artist collegue Carlo Schiuma found this cartoon promoting the stock market as the engine of America’s prosperity.
global accident?
Just as it fits so much to today’s actuality I like to post some excerpt of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker’s City of Transformation / Paul Virilio in Obama’s America article, which I came across on networked_performance.
It also hints to the fact that politics and financial issues are knowingly that much intertwined .. so will stockmarkets rise with the win of Obama? .. if he wins. Or will subconscious fear stand in the way of a substancial change which would effect the world globally? And which signal will it send out to the world when the country that stands so generally for ‘the western mind’ can overcome such deep preconceptions?
Are we beyond Speed and Politics? What characterizes contemporary politics is the unstable mixture of speed information and slow movements. Like the slow implosion of the manufacturing economy, the slow rise of evangelical visions of catastrophe, the slow ascent — the slow ubiquity — of the speed of technology, the slow descent of culture into the cold state of surveillance under the sign of bio-governance. You can see it everywhere. In the world economy, the speed of mortgage backed securities, credit swap debt offerings, and complex derivatives always seeks to move at the speed of light. Iceland is the world’s first country actually liquidated by hyperreality with debts amassed at light-speeds now constituting 10 times its national wealth. Like Michel Serres’ the perfect parasite, the Wall Street financial elite has worked a perfect number on the host of the world economies — implanting unknown levels of toxic debt everywhere in the circulatory system of finance capital, from China and Japan to the European community. Waking up to the danger of hot debt moving at light-speed when it is definitely too late, Japanese bankers suddenly declaim that “It is beyond panic.” Wall Street types say it is “panic with a capital P.”
[…]
In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a “global accident” that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 — exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 — is it possible that Virilio’s “global accident” has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective “no” at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air.
[……] >>> read entire article
Exclusive art booms despite finance crisis
hopefully or just a fairy story? watch >>
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