Meet the guerrilla artist who organized the crypt ‘rug pull’ in front of the SEC
Street vendors abound in midtown Manhattan's Financial District. But weeks ago, on September 14, a particularly unusual vendor set up shop in front of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), turning the Maiden Lane patch into colorful doormats, each painted with direct instructions. “to attract”
People asked for them, but they were fake and not really for sale. The merchandise was part of “Rug Pull,” the latest guerrilla installation by Nelson Sayers, the New York-based hedge fund manager turned artist who some consider “The Warhol of Wall Street” or crypto's most creative activist. As a work of art, “Rug Pull” highlights the many victims of the type of fraud that bears its name.
Last year, crypto was forced to overcome opposition to central regulations. At the same time, victims of carpet dragging and other scams do not yet enjoy the protection that centralized bodies are expected to provide.
“The SEC's weaknesses extend beyond just protecting investors from outright fraud,” Sayers told Cointelegraph, adding that “while they have a very difficult job, they seem too lax in some ways but too aggressive in others.” I feel that the rejection of certain investments has unfortunately led some investors to fraudulent products.
Sirs work on the site when it makes sense. His art practice goes beyond crypto. It takes on other topics, such as unjust imprisonment or the deeper union of art and mathematics.
The artist's family moved from Ethiopia to the Washington DC area when he was five years old. He received his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia at the age of 23.
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Sayers chose to work in finance after reading Michael Lewis's book The Problem with Wall Street Bond Dealers' Fake Poker. He served as Managing Director at Deutsche Bank and Chief Investment Officer of his own fund, Sayers Capital, which won the 2011 HFMWeek Award for Top Relative Value Hedge Fund.
In the year But in 2014, he took the leap to become an artist.
“At that time, art was more interesting than finance,” Saiers said. It has seen significant changes during its financial career – not least the 2008 crisis. In comparison, the field was calm.
“When you daydream about art regularly or wake up in the middle of the night thinking about your next artwork instead of the Nikkei and the S&P, it's time to become an artist.”
He taught painting through videos and books, building on childhood museum visits.
In the year In late 2014, Sayers presented his first full-length exhibition at Studio Vendome in New York, titled “Blinded in the Shadow of Gravity.”
In the year In 2016, it aired three more episodes, including “Shortening: An Unreasonable Rationality,” a show criticizing the unnecessarily long prison sentences of low-level offenders in the US prison industrial complex because inmates often refer to those sentences as “football.” Numbers” The show takes place, literally, in the infamous prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco.
Sayers made a splash in his first guerilla play of 2018, raising a “crypto rat” high in Manhattan's financial district while eyeing the Federal Reserve.
The design was directly inspired by the rat infestation of New York City, which often anchors protests against landlords. In this case, Saiers added crypto-code to the rat's body and Bitcoin (BTC) symbols to its eyes.
The mouse quotes Warren Buffett, who at the time called crypto “rat poison square.” That was the first crypto winter, when Bitcoin fell from $20,000 to $6,000 due to SEC uncertainty and declining confidence in the technology.
That year was the year Sayer got involved in crypto, where only Bitcoin was held. “I wanted to give some support back to the crypto community,” he said.
Even at the height of his madness, he never pulled the rug. While disagreeing with Buffett's criticism of crypto, Sayer cited Buffett's advice to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful” as his strategy for avoiding many scams.
However, Sayers still sympathizes with the lack of savings in the crypto sector, from obscure projects to FTX. Instead of protecting these taxpayers, it has seen the SEC approve bailouts of big banks while the US national debt rises.
“Rug Pull” speaks to that everyman mentality in its simplicity. The Saiers sourced the rugs from Instacart, although the orders were often canceled due to their size. For pragmatism he chose to splash the paint on the “drag” accents and celebrate the guerilla artist aesthetic.
A cart parked next to the sales display lends an extra, abstract feel. The cart itself is another device for your typical New York street vendor, but Saiers' had keys to represent locked liquidity, an exit sign to represent exit scams, and an empty water bottle for lack of liquidity.
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The artist has another New York gallery show coming up next year, but just because “Rug Pull” is finished doesn't mean the project is done. Makers can do it again. It wouldn't be the first time he's replicated a guerilla installation — he even brought a Bitcoin mouse to Washington, D.C., but only had to give the New York Police Department a day's notice to set up in the city. The Secret Service in DC warns him that the bomb squad needs to check the generator the rat uses to protect his spirit. The Saiers went home instead.
The Rug Pull, however, requires no machinery. So, who knows where he'll appear next.
