There is the Temple (Parahi te marae), 1892
I visited the Gauguin exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art today, and in this whirlwind trip through the exhibit (every one of our family members seemed to be on a very different schedule, needing to be three places at once), I was able to latch on to bits and pieces of the audio tour. I was struck by how one’s profession can really turn on a dime, just as Gauguin’s did. Apparently, it wasn’t until 1882, after a stock market crash and recession rendered Gauguin without a job as a broker, that Gauguin decided to abandon the business world to pursue life as an artist full-time.
I wonder, after this recent stock market downturn (which has, though, over the last few months climbed up nicely), how many people in the finance industry turned from their jobs to embrace their inner artiste? I know that when the going gets tough for me at work, I get out my paints and just paint away. It’s REALLY bad art that appears on my canvas. Really. No, really, it is. But that’s okay. It’s therapeutic, and somehow just fleshing out whatever pops into my head (sort of as a physical manifestation of my inner thoughts) gets me over the hump.
Perhaps the big banks and people on the Street should have invested in an easel, modeling clay, or signed up for an Intro to Glassblowing class.
Art & Degrees of Freedom 
Surely collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps count as works of conceptual art. Damien Hirst said 9/11 was a work of art (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/sep/11/arts.september11). I think the case could be made for financial derivatives!
Well that’s a doozy! One thing I heard that sort of rebuts his hypothesis is that the terrorists had never thought that the towers would actually fall. Though perhaps he meant just the idea of the planes ramming the towers was art. (Ooooh, it HURT to write that last sentence.) I guess he would also posit that nuclear fallout and mushroom clouds are beautiful too. Clearly he says this stuff to make the mad cash??
He’s a professional provocateur. Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen made similar statements – see http://c250.columbia.edu/dkv/eseminars/1341/web/s02/1341_02_2.html .
Maybe it’s because from a deconstructionist point of view the greatest art is tearing things down.