A latter-day William Hogarth sent to record the vices of London’s financial elite, Adam Dant spent six months lurking in the hallways and trading rooms of some of the City’s swankiest hedge funds before turning what he’d seen into a series of satirical prints. Commissioned by Spear’s Wealth Management Survey, Dant, 40, relished skewering the BlackBerry-toting, Cartier-wearing, Château Latour–quaffing smart set and captured such common predilections as the hanging of ancient Japanese samurai swords on office walls, the hiring of Russian models as administrative assistants and consultations with shrinks on office time. “This era is redolent of the age of the great explorers,” he says. “The scenes I observed brought to mind the South Sea Bubble during the 18th century.”
