Sarah Meyohas: “I see art as an economic thing.”
What a cocktail of Art & Finance!
“I see art as an economic thing…Any attempt to separate art from the [larger] economy is not true,” says Meyohas. “Because of my education, finance is how I understand how I structure the world.”
Biography
Sarah Meyohas was born in 1991. She has a B.A. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania, a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School and she received an M.F.A. from Yale University in 2015. The French-American artist live in New York where she actually established her disguised art gallery. The apartment, located in a Philip Johnson-designed residential tower, is both her curatorial laboratory and an exhibition space where she supports her peers. The name of her gallery is naturally Meyohas.
“Meyohas is my home; it’s very much about letting people see what I’m looking at,” the artist says. “It’s always changing. I like living that way.”
The artist’s aim is to reflect on the transmission of thought through the flow of information and communication across different media. This is the main concept of her artwork. Some of her exhibitions have been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Wired, Vice, Fortune, Artspace, and The Atlantic. She has even appeared on TV channels such as CNBC, PBS, and CBC. Recently, she has been selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Emblematic Projects
“A pseudo-lecture on the current state of affairs”, that’s how Sarah Meyohas has described her ‘stock performances’ during her 10-day residency in 303 Gallery, in New York. The financial market-oriented performance showed the artist while painting stock price movements on canvas and, at the same time, trading in real time on the New York Stock Exchange. The artist performance has lasted for one week, while the resulted artworks were exhibited at the 303 Gallery, considering it as a “home office”. Moreover, every time she affected a stock’s valuation, she planned to record it using a physical line of oil stick. For the artist, the market brings a lot of people together and, as such, a lot of different emotions and behavior which could be charted. The results were made up by objective and subjective lines of traders’ ability to act over the stock market analysis.
“I’m bringing together being an artist and an economic agent”
At the end, 20 handmade books were created by the MIT and Wharton Business School in collaboration with the artist, utilizing a gold-nanoparticle paint specifically developed by Meyohas and MIT. Books were produced by 303 in Print, the gallery’s publishing arm.
BitchCoin is a new cryptocurrency for buying art and investing in the artist itself. The unique “exhibition” was created in collaboration with Brooklyn’s Where Gallery, a publishing house and a gallery located in a shipping container. The project was the focus of “Where 6” and it had just one purpose: to directly invest in Sarah Meyohas as a value producer rather than on her own art. It is truly a metaphor of betting on someone instead of on something. So, when purchasing BitchCoin, the investor is buying credit for Sarah Meyohas’ future work which could be even not yet produced.
Basically, one BitchCoin is 25 square inches of any Meyohas’ photographic prints. This is fixed rate which is not going to change even if the value of her photography increases. So, for example, purchasing a complete print requires 25 BitchCoins. When buying a BitchCoin, the user receives a certificate with an encrypted number which can be used to redeem the physical artwork, at any time. A change in her artwork’s value entails a change in the relative value of BitchCoin. Predictions and speculations are considered, as in any other form of investment.
During the exhibition, everyone could invest directly in BitchCoin. Meyohas sold more than 100 BitchCoin but, no one bought enough to redeem for an artwork.
“Selling artwork has become this mechanized process,” she says. “At its worst, artists are just stuff producers”
Some Exhibitions
(2017) Escape Attempts: Curated by Kathy Battista, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA
(2017) Sarah Meyohas, Galerie Pact, Paris, FR
(2016) Stock Performance, 303 Gallery, New York, NY
(2016) Legal Tender, The Alice Gallery, Seattle, WA
(2015) BitchCoin, Where, Brooklyn, NY
(2015) Black Mirror, Aperture Foundation, New York, NY
(2015) Lovely Dark, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA
(2015) NEWD Art Fair, Brooklyn, NY
