In the increasingly specialised world of contemporary conceptual art, it is tempting to believe every conceivable subject has already been claimed. Markets have certainly been explored. Money has been examined, criticised, fetishised and dismantled by generations of artists. Yet one emerging figure has quietly carved out an oddly convincing territory that feels entirely his own.
Meet Julian Mercer, the world’s first conceptual investing artist.
Mercer does not make art about wealth. He does not produce ironic commentaries on capitalism. Instead, his practice examines investing itself as a performative act, treating research, hesitation, optimism, compounding and risk as artistic materials. The portfolio, for Mercer, is the sculpture. Due diligence is the performance. Dividends are just one of many outcomes.
“I’ve never been interested in money,” Mercer has said. “I’m interested in the emotional architecture that surrounds the possibility of money.”
Whether that sentence is profound or ridiculous remains a matter of some debate.
Born in Shrewsbury in 1986, Mercer grew up above an independent carpet showroom run by his parents. His fascination with investing began unexpectedly at the age of twelve after discovering several years of discarded Financial Times newspapers that had been used to wrap Persian rugs in storage. Rather than reading the news, he became obsessed with the tiny stock tables, spending afternoons drawing imaginary companies whose share prices followed aesthetically pleasing trajectories.
He later studied fine art in Boston (UK not USA), where tutors reportedly found him intelligent but impossible to assess. His final degree exhibition consisted of a meticulously researched investment portfolio that existed mainly as footnotes. The walls of the gallery were completely empty apart from a small brass plaque reading: No Insider Trading has taken place in this Studio.
Some critics dismissed it as a joke. Others called it one of the strongest conceptual statements of the graduating year.
Mercer’s first recognised body of work, Deferred Entry, appeared in 2014. For three years he publicly documented companies he believed represented excellent long-term investments, then deliberately refused to buy any shares. Every week he published carefully annotated reasons for continuing not to invest.
The resulting archive eventually filled six three-metre filing cabinets.
Visitors described the experience as strangely moving. One reviewer claimed that “this work, with its inordinate discipline becomes an unexpected meditation on mortality and helps to build the sort of pro-investing atmosphere that this country so desperately needs.”
His breakthrough came with Compound Interest, an exhibition staged inside a former private banking office in Lincoln. Rather than displaying objects, Mercer invited visitors to book thirty-minute appointments in which he silently reorganised folders labelled Conviction, Doubt, Timing and Regret.
Nothing was ever removed from the folders.
Nothing was ever added.
The appointments nevertheless remained fully booked throughout the exhibition.
In 2019 he presented Index of Feeling at Kunsthalle Bremen, where every room corresponded to a different market condition. One gallery maintained a persistent atmosphere of cautious optimism through barely perceptible changes in lighting. Another recreated the psychological experience of opening an investment app during a market correction by slowly lowering the ceiling over the course of twenty minutes.
The final room contained only a comfortable chair facing a closed safe.
Museum notes identified it simply as “Long Term.”
Mercer’s practice often involves impossible financial instruments. One ongoing project, Intrinsic Value Studies, consists of annual valuations of entirely fictional businesses. Among them are a manufacturer of ceremonial wheelbarrows, a luxury supplier of municipal waiting rooms, and Europe’s leading exporter of premium geological silence.
Each receives exhaustive financial analysis, discounted cash flow modelling and management commentary despite having never existed. Accountants have occasionally mistaken sections of the work for genuine research.
Collectors are particularly drawn to Mercer’s Limited Conviction Pieces, editions that can only be purchased after the buyer spends forty-five minutes explaining why they should not acquire them. Several sales have reportedly collapsed during these conversations, which Mercer considers integral to the artwork.
His exhibitions are famous for containing almost no visual spectacle. Instead, visitors encounter prospectuses with impossible publication dates, annual reports from organisations that dissolved decades earlier, framed investment committee minutes discussing fictional opportunities and hand-bound notebooks filled with carefully reasoned analyses of companies whose names sound familiar but cannot quite be remembered.
One installation, Margin of Safety, occupied an entire warehouse using nothing more than masking tape marking out the floor space required for hypothetical future gains.
Outside the gallery, Mercer leads a life of almost comic restraint. He rents a modest semi-detached house in Nottingham, cycles everywhere regardless of weather and reportedly maintains colour-coded binders documenting every major financial decision he has almost made.
Friends describe him as quietly funny, intensely curious and incapable of buying anything without first constructing a spreadsheet that ultimately persuades him not to.
He has become an unlikely favourite among economists, behavioural psychologists and fund managers, many of whom recognise uncomfortable truths hidden inside his work. While traditional conceptual artists often ask audiences to question systems of value, Mercer asks something subtler.
Why do we trust our future selves more than our present ones?
His forthcoming exhibition, Forward Guidance, promises to be his most ambitious yet. Visitors will enter a sequence of empty rooms according to appointments allocated by a probabilistic model based on historical market volatility. The exhibition catalogue has already been published, although the contents are subject to annual revision for the next twenty-five years.
Mercer himself seems untroubled by whether audiences understand the work.
“Every investment contains a story about the future,” he says. “I’m simply making those stories visible before reality has the chance to edit them.”
For an artist working in a field that nobody had previously considered an artistic medium, it is a surprisingly persuasive proposition. By treating investing not as a means of accumulating wealth but as a choreography of hope, patience and uncertainty, Julian Mercer has opened a conceptual territory that feels both faintly absurd and entirely plausible. It is exactly the sort of idea that, in retrospect, seems inevitable.