This Artist Is Giving the Finger to the Stock Market

"There really is no such thing as Art," wrote E.H. Gombrich. "There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave," but nobody lives in caves anymore. Now we live in computers, and in financial markets, and the artists' tools have changed. And so we have talked here from time to time about artists whose medium is financial markets, who create art projects that consist of manipulating stock prices. And why not? You can use stock prices to draw lines just like you can chalk or ink or Microsoft Paint, and if you can draw lines then you can make art.

But so far that art has been abstract: The art consisted of pointing out that the artist was drawing the lines for Art, rather than to make money. (Or: She was drawing them to make money by selling the art.) The lines may have had a certain beauty of their own -- I for one would love to hang a Sarah Meyohas stock-chart painting on my wall -- but they looked like stock charts. Here, though, is as far as I know the first instance of representational art produced in the medium of stock prices: