Participatory art within, against and beyond financialization: benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common Max Haiven Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada ABSTRACT Recent transformations in both money and technology coincide with new developments in the processes of contemporary art, all surrounding the idealized virtue of participation. This essay examines three critical artists who orchestrate participatory experiences as a means of challenging neoliberal financialization, the overarching paradigm that is reshaping money, technology and art (and so much else) today. In order to analyse and draw broader lessons from these artworks, I identify three strategic paradigms for participatory art with money: benign pessimism, tactical parasitism and the encrypted common. In employing these strategies, these artworks both struggle within and capitalize upon the ‘participatory turn’ that is familiar to the cognoscenti of contemporary art but also, I argue, entangled with the financialization of money and the rise of financial technologies (FinTech). I hazard we can learn more about the cultural politics of capitalism today through an investigation of the intersections of art and money, or more specifically in this essay, between participatory art (sometimes also heralded as relational aesthetics, social practice or socially engaged art) and technological and financial forms of money. I conclude with a brief meditation on what might be gained by considering these forms of participatory art as financial technologies. KEYWORDS Art; finance; money; markets; participatory culture; technology Introduction This essay explores the work of three contemporary artists who use participa- tory or social practice art techniques to explore the origins, impacts and res- onances of financialization. I approach financialization as an intertwined, mutuallly reinforcing set of tendencies and transformations within the realms of economics, politics, society and culture. This shift is towards both the increasing wealth and power of the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector as well as the more general reconfiguration of the generation of wealth, of methods of institutional governance, of social priorities and of © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Max Haiven mhaiven@lakeheadu.ca CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1363260 Downloaded by [Max Haiven] at 21:58 03 September 2017