Cathy's Art Diary

Innovative pop-up installation outside St Martin in the Fields by Female Invest, a website to promote financial learning and support for female investors. The work marked 50 years since women in the UK gained the right to open a bank account and get a mortgage or a credit card without the signature of a man. There was a very helpful lady with the work who explained this to me but it would have benefited from an information board to explain it as well as it was drawing a crowd. It consisted of a series of covered boxes, the lady described as seats, with labels on them naming inspirational women including those in the world of finance. You could add names to blank labels to be placed in the centre of the work. It was simple but effective. It made me realise I had benefited from this change when I opened my first bank account at 18 just a couple of years later even though I remember my father accompanying me to the bank for this historic moment partly I suspect as he was going to h...

Intriguing online talk from The Art Newspaper looking at whether the art market can be manipulated by gaming type behaviour. Anna Brady, Anny Shaw and Georgina Adam from the journal discussed whether manipulation of the art market could occur in the same way that buyers influenced the stock price of Gamestop recently. Adam carefully laid out how the art market was different and this probably wouldn’t happen but they went on to discuss ways people do try to manipulate the market. They discussed some interesting recent cases such as the Zombie Formalists which gave me lots to look up and learn more about. They then talked about Non Fundable Tokens (NFTs) in light of the recent sale of a digital only art work by Christie’s Beeple’s “Everydays: The first 5,000 days”, the first work of this type to be sold by an auction house. The discussed the possible benefits to the market of applying NFTs to physical works as well as digital only ones. They ended by looking at how art fairs had c...