Picturing Finance: An Exhibition on the Visual Imagination of Financial Capitalism

正如英国金融服务管理局（Financial Services Authority）2009年发表的《特纳评论》（Turner Review）对当前全球金融危机所坚持的那样，“对传统智慧（即市场是‘有效、理性和自我纠正的’）的智力挑战至关重要。“同样，英国特许金融分析师协会最近的年度报告警告说，机构投资者缺乏历史知识是当前危机背后的一个因素（见Mundy 2011）。该项目的目的是通过在北方当代艺术画廊举办一个公开展览，向更广泛的观众提供《资本主义新史》的见解（桑德兰）和随附的目录和网站上的英美金融资本主义在过去三个世纪的视觉表现;同时还将举办一个研讨会，汇集艺术家、作家、记者以及金融和监管部门的重要人物;以及一个针对学童的教育推广方案。通过强调金融在不同的历史时刻和文化中是如何被想象和表现的--事实上，通过提请注意把“市场”描绘成一个整体的困难--是次展览的目的是激发公众讨论，探讨理性市场的神话是如何自然化的，以及金融的复杂性是如何在不同的历史时刻一再令公众着迷。金融资本主义的视觉表现本身就是一个未充分探索的研究领域，但关于这一主题的展览提供了一个令人兴奋的机会，让更广泛的公众和媒体参与资本主义新历史的核心知识问题，在英国公众痛苦地意识到高级金融的可怕力量的时候。这将是第一个为金融的视觉想象提供广泛历史概述的展览。因此，它本身既是一项重要的研究成果，也是一种创新的方式，使公众了解市场不是由一成不变的经济规律支配的，而是由文化和历史构建的。

As the Financial Services Authority's Turner Review (2009) of the current global financial crisis insisted, "Intellectual challenge to conventional wisdoms [that the market is 'efficient, rational, and self correcting'] is essential." Likewise the recent annual report of Chartered Financial Analyst Society of the UK warned that a lack of historical knowledge among institutional investors was a factor behind the current crisis (see Mundy 2011). The aim of this project is to make the insights of the New History of Capitalism available to a wider audience through the creation of a public exhibition at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (Sunderland) and accompanying catalogue and website on visual representations of Anglo-American financial capitalism over the last three centuries; together with an accompanying seminar that will bring together artists, writers, journalists and key figures from the financial and regulatory sectors; and an educational outreach programme for school children. By emphasising how finance has been imagined and represented in different historical moments and cultures - and indeed, by drawing attention to the very difficulty of picturing "the market" as a whole - this exhibition is designed to stimulate public debate about how a particular myth of the rational market came to be naturalised and how seemingly impenetrable complexities of finance have repeatedly mesmerised the public at different historical moments. The visual representation of financial capitalism is an underexplored research area in its own right, but an exhibition on this theme provides an exciting opportunity to engage the wider public and the media with the central intellectual concerns of the New History of Capitalism, at a time when the British public is all too painfully aware of the terrifying power of high finance. This would be the first exhibition to provide a broad historical overview of the visual imagination of finance. It thus constitutes both an important research achievement in its own right as well as an innovative way of making accessible to the public the idea that markets are not governed by immutable economic laws but are culturally and historically constructed.