Financial artscapes: Damien Hirst, crisis and the City of London

This paper explores the entanglement of art and finance over the last decade with a particular focus on the British artist Damien Hirst and the City of London. In so doing it seeks to use the current economic and fiscal crisis in the UK to rethink links between contemporary creative activities and the motivations and mechanisms of urban capitalist economies. The paper explores not only how the art world has aped many aspects of globalised high finance but also how a symbiotic relationship has developed between finance and art in conceptual innovations, promotional strategies and transnational flows of capital, people and ideas. Art and finance have greatly benefited from a shared role in the postindustrial reshaping of inner-city landscapes and a dominant political emphasis on unregulated market relations. The paper concludes by advocating not a romanticisation of new recessionary cultural activities and formations, but greater attempts to work against the mystification and unstinting celebration of market authority and easily commodified forms of artistic practice.

► New cross-disciplinary perspectives on the entanglement of culture and economy. ► Highlights relationship between art and finance in the recent restructuring of London. ► Speculates on a continued post-recessionary agenda of creative neoliberalism.