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THE INVESTOR 20 My first child was born on March 30th, 2008, at the Portland Hospital in London. It was a momentous occasion, of course, for more then the usual reasons. In the heat of the moment, I decided to spend the night after the birth with my wife in her private room. The nurse brought in a cot, but I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The birth of my son wasn’t the cause of my restless. At a time when everything in my life was about to change, I was thinking that my job needed changing, too. I wanted to be a role model for my son. That night, I decided I would follow my passion. When my paternity leave was over, the next day at work, I scheduled a meeting with my boss to discuss the terms of my exit. I told him I was quitting my job as a financial broker. So began my circuitous path to socially-engaged art and socially-responsible investing. After spending my early childhood in the former Soviet Union and emigrating to the United States in 1981 at the age of 9, I instinctively knew that capitalism worked and communism didn’t. That was reinforced when, right after graduation from college, my first job was in that bastion of capitalism, the stock market. Working initially as an option trader on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and then within a year moving on to the American Stock Exchange in New York, I bought the neo-liberal story hook, line and sinker. I religiously read the Wall Street Journal and hungrily consumed the works of Ayn Rand. All of my inherent preconceptions about economic and societal rights and wrongs were reinforced and amplified. A change in my ironclad life philosophy came during the eight years my wife and I lived in England. We moved to London in 2001, a couple of months before the attacks on 9/11. It was a fortuitous move because I might have still been working at the American Stock Exchange, about a block from the World Trade Center. In London, I dove headfirst into the world of capital markets, first as a stock option trader, then moving on to be a broker of credit derivatives and then structured credit derivatives. With each new year, I was making more money, moving up through the ranks, eventually heading the European brokerage team at the second biggest interdealer broker in the world. But something was missing. I found the days at work mind-numb- By Gary Krimershmoys ROLE MODEL Artenol’s publisher, Gary Krimershmoys, organizing the hanging of the magazine's recent "The Revolution Continues"show in Manhattan. Krimershmoys has found renewed purpose in socially responsible investing. Artenol photo MAKING A DIFFERENCE Here are a few things practitioners of sociallyengaged art and socially-responsible investing can learn from each other. n Socially engaged artists can tap into institutional pools of money, perhaps by offering art from funded projects for corporate collections. Though this can associate a project with a commercial entity, the impact the artist’s work has on the community is key. Donating pieces to the corporate sponsor serves a larger purpose. n Impact investment funds can incorporate artists and cultural nonprofits into urban renewal projects while engaging directly with underserved communities. n Artists are often adept at generating publicity. They can create interest in stories that the media might overlook. By teaming up with SRI funds, artists can highlight some of the biggest offenders in the corporate space. This can be similar to what Greenpeace does with polluters, but on a wider, multi-industry scale. Currently, both socially responsible investing and socially-engaged art are in the growth phase. In 20 years, it's very likely both will be considered mainstream, no longer niche approaches in the larger systems where they operate. FALL 2016
MAKE ART GREAT AGAIN It was the feeling of serenity that permeated my otherwise-frantic mind whenever I spent a few hours at a museum that won me over. ing and the nights entertaining clients (who mostly couldn’t talk about anything other then the markets or making and spending money) physically and emotionally abusive. I found that the lifestyle didn’t produce for me real, basic happiness. Another crack in my philosophical foundation formed when I saw that there could be an economic system different from Rand’s pure capitalism. Experiencing the European economic experiment that mixed capitalism and socialism, showed me, to my surprise, that people didn’t derive all of their happiness from economic prosperity. I started to believe that contentedness could be found in shared purposes and stories, more so than through the often-egocentric materialism of financial success. With the birth of my son, I decided to extricate myself from the lucrative brokerage business. To achieve a deeper satisfaction in my working life, I inventoried my passions to see which of them might accommodate a career shift. After about a year of considerable soul searching, I settled on the art world. I was won over by the feeling of serenity that permeated my otherwise frantic mind whenever I spent a few hours at a museum. That, along with a few guided gallery tours and the start of a small art collection, became the foundation of my new career. My ego whispered, “If you can be successful in the cutthroat world of high-level finance, how hard can it be to succeed in the art world?” And so the next phase of my journey began. The art world seemed a mysterious cauldron of social commentary and engagement, human purpose and ego, vanity and an alternative-asset class. These contradictions drew me in, and I was soon managing an international art advisory business, and eventually a gallery in New York’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood. In my new career, I found chances to combine ideas of social progress with a business that had a spiritual joy to it as part of the cultural commentary. The appeal of contemporary art that had a social message and was politically engaged was manifested for me in the first pop-up exhibition I curated, one where I enabled Alex Melamid (the founder of Artenol) to “cure” people with the power of art through an entity called the Art Healing Ministry (AHM). Set up as a kind of gallery/ dispensary, people could come to the AHM to get their maladies cured through the power of art. Other projects over the years ranged from the purely commercial to the purely conceptual. These had wide-ranging degrees of success, measured mostly by the yardstick of magazine reviews and occasional sales of artworks. The conclusion of my exhibition career came with a last show at Vohn Gallery, an exhibit called “AUTOIMMUNE.” Artworks shown diagnosed the human imprint on the world, as a doctor might diagnose a patient’s disease. One of the goals of AUTOIMMUNE was to examine current social questions, the cultural moment, with a fresh eye toward finding answers where none seemed forthcoming. There was also, looking back at on it, an unconscious pull toward combining art and medicine. That pull culminated in Artenol, as characterized by the magazine’s name (taking inspiration from the drug Tylenol). In the 1960s, “land art” combined natural elements in artistic ways to create pieces that lived and breathed in the environment they occupied. Going back further, Art Brut was a movement built on the ash heap of the Second World War, a rejection of a civilization that could perpetrate murder and genocide on an industrial scale. Art movements of this sort helped to create the recent wave of socially engaged art. These works use communities, collaboration, ephemerality and public engagement in a reaction, in my mind, to materialism and the commodification of contemporary art. I've seen and appreciated the impact that socially-engaged art could have, from Paul Chen’s New Orleans performance of “Waiting for Godot” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to Theaster Gates’ projects in the blighted areas of Chicago and Rick Lowe’s effort to transform neglected shotgun houses in Houston into art. Realizing that this type of artist-instigated social impact, on a scale that mattered, can only be financed by cultural institutions, major non-profits and deep-pocketed commercial galleries (unlike the one that I was a part of), my research took me back to the world of finance, to those capital institutions that also tried to improve the environment, create social cohesion and foster corporate accountability. Their efforts seemed to have spiritual affinity with those artists that produced socially-engaged art. As artists try to change the course of society’s arc by influencing culture through empathy and a bit of spectacle, so do a few warriors in the financial sphere try to change the direction of the steamroller that is world finance. These entreprenuers’ efforts have been dubbed “Socially Responsible Investing” (SRI). The Find a link to an article on socially responsible investing in Forbes at artenol.org. 21
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