Compliance, Defiance, and Regulations in the Art World: Reflections on the (A)Moral Turn to Financialized Ethics

In response to recent art market scandals, crimes, and sanction evasions that have spurred moral outrage, the art and antiquities markets have become subjected to forms of regulation imported from the world of finance. Anti-money laundering regulations (AML), countering of terrorism financing regulations (CFT), and sanctions regimes have produced new practices of due diligence, know-your customer (KYC), and suspicious activities reporting (SAR). Far from benign technobureaucratic exercises, these financial regulation and compliance practices should be understood as a form of moral regulation, one that is fundamentally reshaping our understanding of ethics. We are currently witnessing a paradoxical reversal in which financial(ized) regulation becomes the ethical regulation to which we turn when tackling crimes, harms, and ethical breaches. This chapter investigates this evolution in neoliberalism’s relation to ethics. Finance, the former villain that needed art and philanthropy to legitimize its greed and cleanse itself of its misdeeds, has courted regulation to recast itself not only as internally ethical but as the moral disinfectant for purifying the now dirty and corrupt worlds of art and philanthropy. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the dangers of this (a)moral turn to financialized ethics.