art and prediction markets?

Ooh this is a great question, I hope to hear some more examples. One historical, conceptual example that comes to mind for me is Hans Haacke. Decades before the blockchain, he was treating live financial data, public opinion polls, and economic contracts as artistic material.

His 1969 piece News streamed live wire updates into a gallery, and later his 2015 sculpture Gift Horse wrapped a live London Stock Exchange ticker around a horse skeleton. This conceptual framework directly anticipated how digital artists now use live betting feeds to alter dynamic artwork.

Haacke also pioneered crowdsourced data in the 1970s with his Visitor Profiles, where he polled museum visitors on political topics and instantly graphed the results on the wall to visualize collective public sentiment.

AND! He essentially created the conceptual blueprint for the smart contract in 1971 with his Artist's Reserved Rights Agreement, which automated a 15% royalty on all future resales of his work, establishing the logic that underpins modern NFT royalties and defi mechanisms.

I recently finished a feature film on the dark side of prediction markets. Not a docemntary. Started as speculative fiction, but in light of recent events, it’s now hard to call it speculative! Hopefully coming to a film festival near you :)

Jonas Lund
https://jonaslund.com/
https://jonaslund.com/works/the-future-of-growth/
pretty much all of his work!

Really enjoying this thread, and such a good prompt from @simon to narrow in on prediction markets and futarchy specifically, since I think it's a slightly different (and rarer) thing than the broader art-and-finance canon everyone's been building above, though I could easily be missing examples that blur the two.

The way I'd try to draw the line, tentatively, is between artists who use a market as material, something to depict or listen to or gesture at, versus artists who actually install a market as the thing making the decisions. Haacke and the Buchel show already mentioned feel like they sit in the first camp, and I'd gently add John Klima's Ecosystm and Lise Autogena/Joshua Portway's Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium to that pile too, both gorgeous, but the market stays outside the work rather than running it.

The second camp is the one I think @simon actually asking about, and it's thin enough that I only really have two examples I'm confident in. Jonas Lund's Token feels like the clearest one to me, not just because it's crypto and votable, but because the price genuinely tracks belief in his career while the board's votes decide what that belief is a bet on, which is close to what Hanson meant by futarchy in the first place. Sarah Meyohas's Bitchcoin does something similar with her own photographic output as collateral. And if it's useful, MetaDAO apparently runs an actual futarchy protocol for DAO governance, no art pretensions at all, which might be a helpful thing to look at almost as a control, to see what the mechanism looks like with none of the framing Lund puts around it.

Happy to be corrected if there are others I'm missing, this is a genre I've been circling rather than one I know deeply.

this article has a few interesting examples: https://ocula.com/magazine/opinion/the-rise-of-polymarket-art-world-speculation/

I was just reading about prediction markets last week and thought about where an “art work” would fit in this thing. The article @briandroitcour mentioned clarified it for me with this statement. “.....a system busy financialising the event around the object......” makes me think of theater and performance art or for that matter a concert. End of thought.

To add to the list of artworks and financial markets Canadian artist Nancy Paterson made Stock Market Skirt in 1998. The dress's hem raised and lowered in real time based on price fluctuations. For those who want to read about it here is a link.

https://www.surrey.ca/arts-culture/surrey-art-gallery/exhibitions/nancy-paterson-stock-market-skirt