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)对当前全球金融危机的《特纳评论》(Turner Review，2009)所坚称的那样，“对传统智慧(市场是‘高效、理性和自我修正’的)提出智力挑战是至关重要的。”同样，英国特许金融分析师协会(Chartered Financial Analyst Society)最近的年度报告警告称，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馆(桑德兰)创建一个公开展览，以及附带的关于英美金融资本主义过去三个世纪的视觉表现的目录和网站，向更多的观众提供关于新资本主义历史的见解；以及附带的研讨会，将汇集来自金融和监管部门的艺术家、作家、记者和关键人物；以及针对学童的教育宣传方案。通过强调金融是如何在不同的历史时刻和文化中被想象和代表的--事实上，通过提请人们注意将“市场”作为一个整体描绘的难度--此次展览旨在引发公众辩论，即理性市场的某个特定神话是如何演变成自然化的，以及金融的看似难以理解的复杂性如何在不同的历史时刻反复迷住公众。金融资本主义的视觉表现本身是一个未被充分探索的研究领域，但在英国公众痛苦地意识到高级金融的可怕力量之际，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到《资本主义新历史》的核心知识关切中来。这将是第一次提供金融视觉想象力的广泛历史概览的展览。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，使公众能够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.