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Showing posts with label finances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label finances. Show all posts
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Sunday, November 16, 2014
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"Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great enough height." A quote from a creepy, morbid weirdo? Nope. It's from the world of finance, referring to stock prices briefly resurging during or following a severe decline.
The world felt like an increasingly shitty place in the latter half of 2008. Ashen faced financiers trooped from skyscrapers clutching boxes of their stuff, politicians uselessly flapped their mouths and public services everywhere had a slowly tightening noose slipped around their neck. But in 2014 the "green shoots of recovery" are apparently all around us.
Headlines bleat "UK ECONOMY GROWS BY FASTEST RATE" and "UK GDP DATA TO SHOW RECOVERY CONTINUED". Well that's a relief. So we can exhale, smiling ruefully as we remember a difficult few years before sliding back into familiar old financial patterns. Or is this a dead cat ascendant? A lifeless, floppy feline body briefly arcing upwards from the ground before splatting back down in a crunched up boneheap?
It's a thorny question, and one that Alice Woods is eager to explore. Now, artists can be a solipsistic bunch; their work an echo of their internal preoccupations. Not so here, Woods sets out to "address the UK's economic knowledge deficit and elucidate the relationships between cultural and economic decision-making". Fuel for her fire comes from her participation in the Occupy movement and her personal observations of the recession on the North East.
The work takes the form of one room-sized piece supported by three more towards the back of the gallery. All four share a four-object branding; a stylised bomb, tie, floppy disc and padlock, and all are rendered in pure slabs of bright primary colour.
Most obviously eye-catching is the room sized installation. Gigantic pieces of latex stretch across the room, gently curving under their own weight and spilling onto the floor. The room is filled with the chemical tang of freshly cut plastic and this, coupled with the white gallery walls and tiled floor, brings to mind surgical sterility. I am later to learn that this space was once the front window of a butchers, the heavy red plastic flush against the floor quietly recalls the flow of blood.
These gentle arcs echo the graphs of the financial sector, reducing information to minimalist lines and dots. It's all too easy to take the peaks and troughs of these graphs for granted without considering the processes by which they're created. Behind every point of data are infinitely granular analogue events; lorries speeding down motorways, container ships making their way through stormy seas, African miners chipping away at subterranean mineral seams or sunburnt peasant workers harvesting coffee crops.
Woods understands the process of collating this mountain of economic information into one place as a kind of X-Ray vision. You have to see through the human activity and convert the analogue to digital. This makes the choice of materials particularly appropriate; the plastic sheeting gently reflective, super slick and utterly emotionless; or if you're prepared to stretch a little further, even a little erotically sadistic with BDSM-chic undertones.
As a statement it's a powerful in its simplicity and directness. However, if it were presented in isolation I'd criticise it as lacking context and detail. Fortunately, this is provided in the accompanying pieces, both of which are crammed with data.
My favourite of these was a deck of cards that take us through the companies, utilities and public services that have been privatised. There's an instinctive sense of disappointment when you read in the paper that yet another slice of the state has been chopped up and parcelled off to private investors, but it happens so often that it's difficult to remember exactly what has been privatised and to whom. These cards, taken as a whole, represent a dizzying dismemberment of the state. Flicking them open you're confronted with, for example, London Buses or the National Engineering Laboratory or even something as innocuous sounding as The Stationary Office. There's so many here that you marvel that we even have any part of the state still under public ownership.
Getting even further into the complexity that underlies all this are three small books; A Pocket Guide to the Euro. Presented in the now familiar primary colours, these are exhaustively researched and annotated guides to the tangle of dead European currencies like the Franc or Drachma and the country's current relationship to the European single currency and European history in total. This complex information neatly contrasts against the 'big' message of the central installation; giving the exhibition an almost fractal quality - the closer you examine it the more detail you discover.
The final summary comes in a 'curtain' of Woods' interlocking symbols. These bombs, discs, ties and locks are analogues for the suits in a deck of cards. Taken straightforwardly they represent various aspects of institutionalism, anarchism, security and information, all which coalesces to some level around the City of London on any given day of the week (or, most powerfully, during the Occupy movement). It's here that we see the binding together of philosophies, politics and emotion that form the unpredictable financial markets that, like it or not, control our lives.
Tackling a subject this complex is pretty damn brave, yet Woods has pulled it off. She's had clear political, intellectual, aesthetic and intellectual hurdles, but she's done it in style. It's a damn neat exhibition, one that rewards close attention and is fuelled by pragmatism and the desire to comprehend systems that often seem arcane to the point of mysticism.
Are we in the middle of a dead cat bounce? No-one know. And *shiver* that's scary.
Dead Cat Bounce is at Light Eye Mind, 176 Blackstock Road N5 1HA until 29th November, 11-6pm
Photos by Paul Clarke
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Sunday, January 19, 2014
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In The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese elevates financial trading to a dark religion that promises heaven on earth. This is a story of mystical market forces, primal chest-beating, mind-bending narcotics and rapt crowds worshipping the most corrupt of high priests. Scorsese serves us up 3 hours of excess; horrible men engaged in horrible acts, their fabulous wealth the product of a million tiny swindles, men stickily fingering their way through our wallets and purses - a fingering we hate to acknowledge we're getting off to.
This is the world of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), the film chronicling his progress from ambitious penny stock trader to mentally deranged sociopath. The meteoric rise and collapse of Jordan Belfort has neat parallels to Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino, completing a thematic trilogy of predatory protagonists getting precisely what they want, then having this world crash down around them. One of the cleverest decisions Scorsese makes is understanding that the minutia of financial trading is essentially irrelevant to the story. In a marvellous voice-over, DiCaprio's Belfort often starts beginning a complicated explanation about how pump-and-dump schemes work before reminding us that all we really care about is that he's conjuring dump-trucks full of money apparently from thin air.
Much has been made of the morality of the film; the central criticism being that showcasing excess with such gleeful, stylish verve amounts to an advertisement for it - columnists fretting over reports of audiences of financial traders whooping in recognition as they recognise their own lives. As I see it you'd have to brain dead to watch this and come to the conclusion that this is something to be sincerely emulated. That said, it's honest film-making to acknowledge that living a purely hedonistic lifestyle is at minimum superficially attractive. We find ourselves comparing our own lives to this glitzy, chaotic free-for-all - a predatory, materialistic part of us wanting to be in Belfort's shoes as he blows coke up a prostitute's arse or trashes his sports car.
The key to all this is the voiceover - revealing Belfort as a deeply unreliable narrator within the first few minutes as he corrects the film, explaining that his Ferrari is white rather than red, the reality of the film immediately warping to accommodate him. That what we're seeing is malleable and fluid is Scorsese's secret weapon; this is Jordan Belfort's story, and he edits his life to make himself look great. Sometimes reality peeps through though, like a telling moment when he recounts the story of one of his partners who committed suicide - a grisly crime-scene photo flashing on screen that's at odds with the glossy high-saturation aesthetic. Almost as if realising that this is a bad route to go down - Belfort quickly skips past this and onto more extreme partying - constantly papering over the cracks in his ugly edifice.
For me, the most illustrative moment in the film is a faux 90s 'Get Rich Quick' infomercial starring Belfort, replete with neon-bikini babes, yachts and fast cars. "All this could be yours..." informs a smartly suited Belfort. We scoff at the cheesy production values and obviously manipulative message, yet even as we chortle at the suckers who'd be convinced in by this rubbish we can't help but envy Belfort's material success. This infomercial is a microcosm of the film as a whole; revealing The Wolf of Wall Street as carefully constructed fantasy, seducing us with a soapy handjob as it exploits our secret, base desires.
It'd be real easy to make a film about Wall Street (or for that matter the City of London) that functions as a cathartic Django Unchained style revenge fantasy, showing us the baddies getting a violent comeuppance. Scorsese goes deeper than this, showing the character's accumulation and worship of money as something endemic to capitalism, the excess of Belfort merely the logical conclusion of desires instilled in us throughout our lives. No matter what your political convictions, to grow up and live within a consumerist, capitalist society indoctrinates you into a world of possessions and property, a world where, as much as you might convince yourself otherwise, deep down you measure the worth of a person by the amount of money in their bank account.
Jordan Belfort, horrible though he is, is not a particularly unique or surprising kind of monster. His existence is the inevitable consequence of the free market capitalism espoused by the great and powerful, his insatiable greed and willingness to exploit people leaving him a perfect amoral creature that naturally thrives within an economic system designed to reward his behaviour.
Though the film doesn't cover the 2008 financial crash, the contemporary caricature of the slimy, profit-obsessed banker looms large in the background. But again, despicable though these people are, it's us that's in the firing line - every moment we catch ourselves secretly envying Belfort's material success another condemnation of us. Rubbing salt into the wound, Scorsese goes out of his way to undermine the glitziness by showing the sex as mechanical and unfulfilling, the drug-taking as nauseous and pathetic and the possessions as transitory and destructive - yet even though we know wealth won't bring us happiness we can't help but want it like an addict wants the needle.
The last shot of the film sums it all up. Belfort is reduced to giving motivational 'Get Rich Quick' talks, facing an audience of gormless, slack jawed nobodies who want to be just as horrible as him. See that moron in the crowd pathetically dreaming of his shiny Ferrari and model wife? The person who sees human scum like Belfort trotting around like a pig in shit, ripping off people to maintain his opulent existence and thinks "Oh my god, I could be that human scum!" That's you that is.
Scorsese thus posits disasters like the 2008 crash, the election of free-market promoting governments and the exploitation of the poor as symptoms of the beast that squats in our collective capitalist heart. The events of the film rub our noses in the horrible world, but it's a horrible world that we've created by silent, inactive consensus - and there's no way out. As Žižek famously said, "it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" and so, because of our own limited imaginations and indoctrination, we're condemned to suffer the depredations of infinite Jordan Belforts. And we probably deserve to.
The Wolf of Wall Street's 3 hours zip by, and the film contains an energy that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 71 year old director. It's got an impossibly witty script, is one of the funniest films of the year (there's even a brief sojourn into Mr Bean territory!) and has a dynamite cast - the standouts being DiCaprio, a fantastically demented Jonah Hill and an all too brief yet memorable appearance by Matthew McConaughey. There's no reason why you shouldn't go and see this. So go and see it already.
★★★★★
The Wolf of Wall Street is on general release now.
Much has been made of the morality of the film; the central criticism being that showcasing excess with such gleeful, stylish verve amounts to an advertisement for it - columnists fretting over reports of audiences of financial traders whooping in recognition as they recognise their own lives. As I see it you'd have to brain dead to watch this and come to the conclusion that this is something to be sincerely emulated. That said, it's honest film-making to acknowledge that living a purely hedonistic lifestyle is at minimum superficially attractive. We find ourselves comparing our own lives to this glitzy, chaotic free-for-all - a predatory, materialistic part of us wanting to be in Belfort's shoes as he blows coke up a prostitute's arse or trashes his sports car.
 |
| This pretty much sums it up. |
For me, the most illustrative moment in the film is a faux 90s 'Get Rich Quick' infomercial starring Belfort, replete with neon-bikini babes, yachts and fast cars. "All this could be yours..." informs a smartly suited Belfort. We scoff at the cheesy production values and obviously manipulative message, yet even as we chortle at the suckers who'd be convinced in by this rubbish we can't help but envy Belfort's material success. This infomercial is a microcosm of the film as a whole; revealing The Wolf of Wall Street as carefully constructed fantasy, seducing us with a soapy handjob as it exploits our secret, base desires.
It'd be real easy to make a film about Wall Street (or for that matter the City of London) that functions as a cathartic Django Unchained style revenge fantasy, showing us the baddies getting a violent comeuppance. Scorsese goes deeper than this, showing the character's accumulation and worship of money as something endemic to capitalism, the excess of Belfort merely the logical conclusion of desires instilled in us throughout our lives. No matter what your political convictions, to grow up and live within a consumerist, capitalist society indoctrinates you into a world of possessions and property, a world where, as much as you might convince yourself otherwise, deep down you measure the worth of a person by the amount of money in their bank account.
Jordan Belfort, horrible though he is, is not a particularly unique or surprising kind of monster. His existence is the inevitable consequence of the free market capitalism espoused by the great and powerful, his insatiable greed and willingness to exploit people leaving him a perfect amoral creature that naturally thrives within an economic system designed to reward his behaviour.
Though the film doesn't cover the 2008 financial crash, the contemporary caricature of the slimy, profit-obsessed banker looms large in the background. But again, despicable though these people are, it's us that's in the firing line - every moment we catch ourselves secretly envying Belfort's material success another condemnation of us. Rubbing salt into the wound, Scorsese goes out of his way to undermine the glitziness by showing the sex as mechanical and unfulfilling, the drug-taking as nauseous and pathetic and the possessions as transitory and destructive - yet even though we know wealth won't bring us happiness we can't help but want it like an addict wants the needle.
 |
| Jonah Hill - two time Oscar nominee and deserves to be two time Oscar winner. |
Scorsese thus posits disasters like the 2008 crash, the election of free-market promoting governments and the exploitation of the poor as symptoms of the beast that squats in our collective capitalist heart. The events of the film rub our noses in the horrible world, but it's a horrible world that we've created by silent, inactive consensus - and there's no way out. As Žižek famously said, "it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" and so, because of our own limited imaginations and indoctrination, we're condemned to suffer the depredations of infinite Jordan Belforts. And we probably deserve to.
The Wolf of Wall Street's 3 hours zip by, and the film contains an energy that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 71 year old director. It's got an impossibly witty script, is one of the funniest films of the year (there's even a brief sojourn into Mr Bean territory!) and has a dynamite cast - the standouts being DiCaprio, a fantastically demented Jonah Hill and an all too brief yet memorable appearance by Matthew McConaughey. There's no reason why you shouldn't go and see this. So go and see it already.
★★★★★
The Wolf of Wall Street is on general release now.
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