'Zero Dollar' For Zero Sense

A guy with an AIG swipe card around his neck approached. AIG! The now quasi-nationalized titan of the insurance business, which was chin deep in the toxic investments that are central to our current troubles! Get him, Ms. Gilbert!

"How are you doing?" she said, the way a nurse might inquire of a bedridden patient. In part, the tone is just Gilbert's style -- she's sensitive by nature, no matter how confrontational this mission is -- and in part it's a response to the body language of AIG Guy, who seems crestfallen.

"It's depressing," he shrugs, as he walks away. "You don't know if your division will be around tomorrow."

A pattern is set. Anyone who will stop and take a "Zero Dollar" isn't worth shouting at. They all seem shell-shocked -- not surprising, given their proximity to this explosion -- and in recent weeks, they've surely lost more than Gilbert, who pulled her money out of the stock market in August 2007, having sustained modest losses. Meantime, the handful of tycoonish types who strut by won't stop, even when Gilbert pads after them. They walk too quickly.

As a drama of retribution, this is pretty unsatisfying. Nobody seems confronted by the art; they either love it or ignore it. As this becomes clearer, an investment banker stops to argue politely that Gilbert is in the wrong part of town.

"These guys down on Wall Street, they just do transactions," says Alec Kushnir, who is wearing dark sunglasses. "Most of the people here, they live on Staten Island and take the bus to work. They're not the ones who bought subprime mortgages. They just settle trades."

Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan, Bear Stearns -- they're in Midtown, a $25 cab ride to the north. If you want to confront the rascals who brought us credit default swaps, you need to head to Park Avenue in the 40s. And not to get too technical, but the whole zero dollar concept is kind of off the mark, isn't it? Our problem isn't hyper inflation, after all. The dollar has held up pretty well in recent weeks.

Gilbert later pronounced her project "very interesting." "I was surprised by how many Wall Streeters didn't care and how responsive everyone else seemed to be," she said. "And there was that undertone of anxiety as well."

If this experiment in art-related reckoning illustrates anything, it's just how tricky the issue of blame is now. Someone's neck needs wringing. But whose? We've got a long list of suspects -- speculators of every stripe, lenders, mortgage brokers, home buyers, and on and on -- but nobody is waving the white hankie of responsibility. Even Richard S. Fuld Jr., the guy who ran Lehman Brothers for years, wouldn't cop to any mistakes in his testimony before Congress on Monday. He sure didn't apologize.

We're Americans, and we need villains, darn it. Smoking them out won't be easy. And now we know it'll take real money.