- The course came about because an artist,
very famous German conceptual artist
and filmmaker, Hito Steyerl,
had visited the Yale School of Art
and she began to explore
collaborative activities
and we talked about how we
would bring Yale MFA students
together with MBA students
to collaborate on something.
And the cryptocurrency turned out
to be a wonderful catalyst
for that engagement.
- In effect, the focus was how
do you make a cryptocurrency
that is art or has meaning or has value?
And so we worked together
over the course of a week
with various lectures and
workshops, separate meetings.
And in the end we came
with a tangible project
that we now have gone beyond the course
and are continuing to work on 'til today
and hopefully we have it
completed in the spring.
- As with many people who
are kind of interested
in a topic but they
don't know much about it,
it's easy to caricature things.
And my hope in bringing them
together was that the artist
would appreciate some of the
complexities and intricacies
and get engaged in some of the real world,
or even theoretical, but
financially constructed world.
And perhaps that would
spark their imagination,
their future interests,
and the resulting art
would ultimately be more
sophisticated, more meaningful.
- Initially when I signed
up for it I thought
it would just be an
interesting intersection
of finance and art, and
a little technology.
- It was wonderfully interdisciplinary
and just the kind of thing
you would expect to happen
at a place like Yale where there's
a lot of cross-pollination if you will.
- And so coming away from the
course I really learned a lot
not just about the currency
itself and what its place
in the world is, but also
just how to take any object,
take any element of society,
and really analyze it truly
deeply through an artistic lens
to get more tangible insights into it.
- Our MBAs at School of
Management are really interested
in careers with meaning,
careers that relate
to other parts of society.
And I see a real hunger
in many of our MBAs
for connecting outside of
management and business
and finance to areas that
give life meaning and purpose.
And art is just one of
the most important things
that human society does.
