All that glitters on Wall Street is fool’s gold for a New York artist, Zefry Throwell, who has gone to extreme lengths to bare his views on the world’s most famous finance centre. The exhibition transfers the angry sentiments of the Occupy Wall Street protests to the rarefied atmosphere of the art gallery. Housed in a bare-walled industrial space, ‘Ocularpation: Wall Street’ features rows of golden objects that the 36-year-old artist says represent the Financial District’s chief professions. There are brooms for the janitors, piggybanks for bankers, handcuffs for police, high-heeled sandals for prostitutes, paper coffee mugs and Blackberry phones, neck ties, legal pads and a FedEx box — all real and ready to use, except for being encased in gold-coloured paint. “Gold in this body of work references the current American financial dream: sold as a glitter jewel of bling and hype, but in fact a fantasy whose value is a thin layer of myth and speculation.”
