FABIO CIFARIELLO CIARDI
(Italy, 1960)


A BID Match, 2008
Internet, software, video projection, sound
Courtesy the artist



Composer Fabio Cifariello Ciardi presents a multimedia installation mapping the performance of the share price of Sotheby’s, a major player in the global auction market listed at the stock market, and of the New York Stock Exchange. The term BID refers both to the bidding process at an auction and to the abbreviation BID for Sotheby’s at the New York Stock Exchange. The time span monitored was 15 September 2008, the first day of the auction of Damien Hirst at Sotheby’s, which outperformed the expectations of the auction house. The composer programmed a software able to monitor in real time the volatile movements of all stocks composing the index, assigning the sound of a musical instrument to one group of five stocks at a time. What we are listening to are financial data normally presented in form of numerical series, graphs or diagrams, transformed by a computer programme into the siren song of the fluctuating universe of the stock market. Cifariello Ciardi thereby questions the assumption of rationality as the governing principle in speculative markets and expresses what he perceives as the hidden emotionality in the unforeseeable fluctuations of stock prices. American economist Robert Shiller referred to this phenomenon as “irrational exuberance”.









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