Giving one to the Guptas
“What I have done is essentially a world first, ie used a financial information medium to create a recognisable image. Conceptual art, Protest Art, Indelible Graffiti, whatever you want to call it, I gave it a go to highlight the ongoing systematic rape of our country by the Gupta family.”
The Finger made the news
The Economist
A South African trader finds an artful way to protest Zuma
JAMES GUBB was finishing off the knuckles when the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) shut him down. Trading single shares between two accounts, Mr Gubb had managed to “draw” the image of a fist with an upright middle finger onto the share-price chart for Oakbay Resources and Energy Limited, a company controlled by the Gupta brothers, cronies of President Jacob Zuma, that is at the centre of allegations of “state capture” in South Africa.
Mr Gubb, a former hedge-fund manager, considers his middle-finger salute to be protest art. South Africa is in the grip of a sprawling corruption scandal; the Guptas are accused of abusing their close ties with Mr Zuma’s family to influence cabinet appointments and win government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars (they deny allegations of wrongdoing). Mr Gubb created his artwork after Mr Zuma fired a respected finance minister. “Protest art has a very strong foundation in South Africa, crude as this might be,” Mr Gubb says.
Bloomberg
This Artist Is giving the Finger to the Stock Market
"There really is no such thing as Art," wrote E.H. Gombrich. "There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave," but nobody lives in caves anymore. Now we live in computers, and in financial markets, and the artists' tools have changed. And so we have talked here from time to time about artists whose medium is financial markets, who create art projects that consist of manipulating stock prices. And why not? You can use stock prices to draw lines just like you can chalk or ink or Microsoft Paint, and if you can draw lines then you can make art.
But so far that art has been abstract: The art consisted of pointing out that the artist was drawing the lines for Art, rather than to make money. (Or: She was drawing them to make money by selling the art.) The lines may have had a certain beauty of their own -- I for one would love to hang a Sarah Meyohas stock-chart painting on my wall -- but they looked like stock charts. Here, though, is as far as I know the first instance of representational art produced in the medium of stock prices:
James Gubb created what must rank as the first piece of protest art on a financial media platform in the world – trading between two accounts, illiquid Oakbay Resources and Energy shares in order to create the image of an “up yours” middle finger in the price chart.
Daily Maverick
Finding Art: James Gubb’s stock price protest poetry breaks boundaries. JSE disagrees.
On 31 March Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, while addressing the media outside of the Treasury offices in Pretoria after he and his deputy Mcebisi Jonas had been fired via SMS the night before, called on South Africans to mobilise and organise against corruption and State Capture. In Cape Town, seasoned equities trader and hedge fund manager James Gubb heeded the call. As a form of protest, Gubb began trading Gupta-owned Oakbay shares in order to create, in the price chart, a work of art depicting a middle finger. By MARIANNE THAMM.
Three days after James Gubb created what must rank as the first piece of protest art on a financial media platform in the world – trading between two accounts, illiquid Oakbay Resources and Energy shares in order to create the image of an “up yours” middle finger in the price chart – some market analysts speculated that the surge might have been due to a “renewed optimism about the nuclear programme”.