Between Habit and Thought in New TV Serial Drama by John Lynch

Author:John Lynch [Lynch, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429588723
Google: tTlJEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 58445752
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

In an aesthetic sense described by this philosophy, an artwork fixes the percepts and affects of the artist to create a zone of potentiality that is an opening to different possible states of being. Hence the compulsive need of the financial Titan to take ownership of this most radical practice. If we look in more detail at how artworks are mobilized within Billions, it is revealing of some significant ideas about the capture of the nomadic forces of art by finance capital.

As we have seen earlier, artworks populate the world of the hedge fund operating in terms of displays of wealth and attitude that support its aggressive position on the market. They are markers of status. The art collection is displayed throughout the offices of the hedge fund and not just in the office of the CEO. Now, this is not something specific to hedge funds or Wall Street; certain European central banks have long collected extensive art collections for display in their buildings. The US Federal Reserve initiated a formal policy of collection from 1971 under a directive from the Nixon administration. Clearly, this is tied to various ideological strategies of national identity and historical narrative. For instance, in Germany, the Bundesbank has been collecting art since its establishment in 1957, and according to the collection’s curator, “From the beginning, the collection was designed to decorate the rooms, but it was also about culture, and creating a democratic society after fascism” (Torry, 2017). The role of the director of the bank is even tied to this process where their choice in artworks from the bank’s collection is apparently evidence of their fiscal ability. The Chair of the Federal Reserve during the 2008 crisis, Ben Bernanke, was praised for his dexterity in responding to the financial crisis being described as “creative”, “innovative”, and “flexible”, as evidenced by his taste in art (Goley, 2010).

Other than the Sandicot storyline described earlier, there are two other plot lines in Billions that address this aspect of the show. The first is the issue of a tax avoidance scam involving artworks purchased by Bobby Axelrod, and the second is the “purchase” of an artist in season 5.

In episode 10 of season 4, a boxed-up painting is delivered to the offices of Axe Capital from a bank in Switzerland that has been storing it and 17 others since Axe purchased them at the Basel art fair. We don’t get to see the painting or any of the others at this stage, and the key element of the plot point is the creative use of a freeport for storage that will facilitate tax avoidance. Here, then, we are primarily dealing with art as a commodity for speculation, and we have already seen glimpses of oil paintings in the safe room at Axe’s residence. According to the Wall Street Journal, hedge-fund managers are playing as disruptive a role in the art market as they are in the financial markets (Crow, Germano & Benoit, 2014). Steven Cohen, chairman and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.