Greed, fear and irrational exuberance - the deep play of financial and cultural speculation

Abstract

This thesis is based on a body of work completed between 2001 and 2009, comprisingperformance/installations that addressed the impacts of global financial speculation and themechanisms of a free-market economy. Arguably, financial speculation has either driven, orprofoundly influenced, political policy and social behaviour ‘from Wall Street to Main Street’;from the corporate boardrooms of developed nations to the informal markets of nations stillstruggling to come to terms with the demise of classical socialism in the postmodern world.Each 24-hour cycle of global financial markets, comprising millions of transactions, representsnot only objectively calculated risk management, but also a spectrum of speculators’emotions ranging between greed, fear, and ‘irrational exuberance’. Theperformance/installations included in this thesis address the motivations behind speculativemarket activity, as well as the interaction between the human and technological processesembedded in the markets. Art and cultural critic Brian Holmes posits this interaction as ‘deepplay’, or ‘the aestheticized exploration of the actions and gestures unfolding within a globalmicrostructure’. The microstructure referred to in this thesis is that of the global financialmarket, its foundations, development and impacts on contemporary society. My explorationwill unpack aspects of the history and current manifestations of the free-market economy, andwhile it is not the intention of this thesis to theorise economics, nor the phenomenon ofglobalization, certain premises will be addressed as relevant to the projects. In the process,shared borders between the financial market and art practice have inevitably become blurred.The methodological enquiry that underscores this thesis does not reject the free-marketeconomy, nor speculative financial activity. Instead, I have suggested that they might becritiqued by means of cultural intervention. I imply that by direct participation in capital flows,and through exposure to the fears and anxieties bred in the financial market’s domain, thecomplex elements that have produced, and continue to produce significant impacts onsociety, might be better understood