Art Bytes: The New Paint-by-Numbers?

Sarah Meyohas on How She Is Manipulating the Financial Markets to Make Art

By Dylan Kerr

Jan. 8, 2016

The artist Sarah Meyohas performing her first iteration of "Stock Performance," 2014/2015. © Sarah Meyohas, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

        Around this time last year, the art press picked up a quirky new story: a Yale photography M.F.A. named Sarah Meyohas had created her own cryptocurrency called Bitchcoin, with an exchange rate set at one Bitchcoin to 25 square inches of a Meyohas print. (As the value of her work changes over time, so too will the value of the coins.) In an art world that was grappling, often dismissively, with the shift toward art-as-investment, Meyohas’s take on the Bitcoin addressed the world of finance with unusual directness and a cooperative stance. It seemed to offer collectors a tool for using Meyohas's artworks as investments. 

Sarah Meyohas

Her new show “Stock Performances” at 303 Gallery (running January 8^th through the 30^th) reverses the dynamic, using investments to generate artworks. For the next several weeks the gallery will become a stock exchange-cum-studio as Meyohas trades with an eye for aesthetics rather than profit, recording her results along the way with oil stick on canvas. At the same time, she’ll be creating a series of artists' books with a different kind of commodity, gold (the books feature paints made with gold nanoparticles, developed in conjunction with Dr. Erik Dreaden of MIT). And to top it off, the 24-year-old is also opening a new exhibition of works by Suzeanne McClelland and Brock Enright on January 22nd in her Upper East Side apartment gallery, Meyohas.
Artspace’s Dylan Kerr met with Meyohas in 303’s cavernous gallery space where, surrounded by blank canvases that will eventually be marked with the records of her (and her stocks’) performance, they discussed how Meyohas went from a finance major at Wharton to a gallery show in Chelsea, the "lifestyle" of running an apartment gallery, and the potential legal ramifications of manipulating the stock market.

Let me preface this conversation by admitting that my knowledge of the stock market is more or less limited to what I’ve been able to glean from The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street. In layman's terms, what exactly are you doing here at 303?
I’m going to be trading stocks on the New York Stock Exchange over the course of the next few weeks. I won’t be looking at what the company is or what it does—I’m only looking at the line. My purpose in trading is to make the line that represents the stock's performance move in a way that I have impact on. This means I can’t trade Apple stock, for instance—there are too many participants there, and I would have to trade who knows how much to make an impact.
I’ll be trading smaller stocks, maybe a few with funny names—the stock I traded in the past was called Golden Enterprises [Meyohas created an early iteration of her "Stock Performance" in 2014/2015]. Once I have affected the stock’s valuation, I’ll go to one of these canvases and gesturally draw the line with black oil stick. The painting becomes a data visualization of the stock’s performance, where I’m enacting a kind of mirroring from the screen to the canvas.
How much money and how many trades are required to actually affect these stocks?
I’ve never really said how much I’m putting up to trade because I don’t want the focus to be on that. I want to focus on the result of what I’ve done, especially because the last stock price, which is supposedly how much the company is worth, is literally just the last stock price that was traded. That’s very much a representation. I’m dealing in the representation, not how much money I’m putting in.
I’m really interested in the sense of scale. The market is phenomenally large. If you include derivatives, there’s something like $900 trillion worth of assets traded. It’s beyond what you can imagine, and it’s not like you can measure it in comparison to anything else—it’s large in the absolute. The changes that I’ll be enacting here will look big, but if you put them in the context of the magnitude of the actual market, they’re tiny to the point of invisibility.
Where do you get the money to make these trades?
It’s my own money, so I'm blending me as an economic agent with me as an artist. It's a losing strategy, of course—it’s not like I’m making bank. There’s a good chance that...

:::::||CONTINUE READING||---»-» 

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/art-bytes/sarah-meyohas-stock-performance-53406