Of the seventy-nine insider trading convictions meted out since 2009, seventy-four of the convicted felons were high-profile art collectors. This amazing statistic had gone unnoticed until one of the remaining five philistines recently decided to curate a show.
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| Arjam Mahandraberg, date unknown |
Arjam Mahandraberg, a former analyst for GRD London has put together one of the most unusual exhibitions of the season. If there are consistent threads of taste among the miscreants I will leave it to others to tease them out. To me, the only common denominators were the State of Connecticut and the price tags.
The unusual venue for the exhibition, a former boxing gym on Peck Slip in way downtown New York, is close enough yet far enough from Wall Street to allow the obvious ironies to marinate.
All the art in the show is for sale having been duly
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| Dirge, Currado Malaspina, 1998 |
confiscated by the Feds as ill gotten non-fungible assets. The arbitrary, almost callous installation of the extremely uneven work gives the show an upscale thrift store feel which is not altogether inappropriate. Pieces by artists as varied as Koons, Coswell, Malaspina and Katz can now be seen as a form of contraband giving their works a mutinous, innovative recalcitrance, a quality they so sorely lack on their own.
One leaves the exhibition with the distinct impression that if this is any evidence of the cultivation and taste that money buys then indeed crime does not pay.
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