Shoreditch café, with an oat matcha decaf latte and sunglasses
Collectors, thank you for making my career change so enthralling and lucrative. I had thought that being a hedge fund manager would be more profitable than being an artist, but thanks to you I know that it is the artist who has the bigger wallet.
It has been exactly 217 days since I left my job in the City to pursue my true calling: digital artistry. I am no longer Managing Director of ****** ****** – I am now Hedge Fund, Visual Philosopher of the Blockchain Renaissance. My mediums are pixels, styluses and electricity.
This morning I unveiled my latest work: Cool Sexy Capitalism — a looping animation of a melting Gherkin (the building, not the pickle) raining pound signs into a Louis Vuitton puddle. I priced it at a modest £170,000 because I’m not here to devalue culture. A man on Instagram offered me £84,000 and a “shoutout.” I blocked him for the good of the arts.
I’ve also completed Liquidity Crisis No. 3, which is a 3D-rendered goldfish screaming silently in a martini glass. Deeply moving. Critics say it makes them dizzy.
People keep asking, ‘Hedge, do you miss finance?’ And I say, “No, I am free now. Free to sit in cafés with exposed brick walls, drawing surreal clouds, and saying things like “the algorithm is my brush,” which I caught myself saying yesterday.
Today I attended a digital art fair in Hackney. A man wearing chainmail and Crocs told me my piece NFTs are My Love Language made him “feel like a spreadsheet trapped in a lava lamp.” Which, honestly, is exactly the reaction I was going for. He didn’t buy it, but he did offer to trade for a bag of homegrown mushrooms and a zine about Hackney’s sewer system.
I politely declined.
I remain committed to selling nothing for less than £100,000. Anything cheaper, and it’s basically clip art for peasants.
Oh — and big news — I’ve been invited to exhibit at an “underground crypto-baroque gallery” in Dalston. It’s inside what used to be an urban chicken farm. Very exclusive. They serve wine out of jam jars and nobody has health insurance.
Anyway, I must dash — I’ve got to finish my latest piece: Bear Market Ballet, a digital image of Jeff Bezos pirouetting through a thunderstorm of emojis.
Artfully yours,
Hedge (digital artist, ex-finance bro)