At the most recent edition of the Whitney Biennial, the long-running survey of American art, visitors were greeted by a quote of the sort not usually seen in museums: “The two greatest stores of wealth internationally today [are] contemporary art [. . . and] apartments in Manhattan.”

The words, from Larry Fink, a member of President Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum and CEO of BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment management firms, were written over a craggy graph carved into the wall tracking the rising value of the debt levels owned by the firm. Alongside were showcased the work of 30 artists, all of whom are in financial debt.

The piece, which highlights the art world’s tangled relationship with finance, was the latest iteration of Debtfair, an ongoing investigation into the business of art by the Occupy Museums collective — and it’s just one of the ways artists are following the money to shed light on the infamous opaque $50 billion global art market and how the economy of culture really works.

“We framed the whole project as basically asking the question: Who are American artists?” says Noah Fischer, a New York-based artist and initiating member of Occupy Museums, the art activism group that grew out of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. The Debtfair project, which uses self-submitted data from artists, examines the ways both the labor and the debts of artists help fill the pockets of big business.

As part of the exhibition, the group put together a CV of all of the artists in the Biennial and found that the 63 artists and collectives in this latest class of American artists represented more than 100 academic degrees and carried together nearly $6 million in student loans. It’s a sobering reminder that the works in the museum, and not just those that are part of the project, are all mired in a system that enriches a select few off of the work of many. After all, one of the exhibition’s sponsors, JPMorgan Chase, holds the debt of at least 10 artists in this show.

“I don’t think we’re making a claim that artists have any special role to finance, but finance has come to the art world,” explains Occupy Museum’s Kenneth Pietrobono. “Artists have such proximity to finance that there’s almost this responsibility or agency. We’re coming to the cultural sphere, seeing the way that the financial world is using it . . . to wash their money in order to erase the shady environmental or socially unacceptable ways that that money is acquired.”

It’s not just the debt that artists often accrue to gain entree into the art world (despite the complete lack of economic security in the field) and the vast sums of money fetched by top pieces — like a recent record-setting Sotheby’s sale of a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat at auction — that ties art to finance. Even before the new political administration’s proposed budget cuts to arts funding, the United States has done little to sponsor the arts when compared to counterparts around the world, leaving much of the presentation of culture beholden to philanthropy. It’s a system of funding that creates a backing-based narrative of what is shown, what is sold, and therefore what becomes the artistic canon. (Such a relationship was recently cast into the public attention when Museum of Modern Art president emerita Agnes Gund announced the sale of a $150 million painting by Roy Lichtenstein to fund criminal justice reform, calling on other prominent collectors to take similar action.)

This connection between art and financial activism is where Andrea Fraser is currently focusing her attention. The artist has used art to critique institutions, including prisons and museums, in the past. Her latest work looks at the money trail linking major museum donors to politics.

“At this point, I’m not sure that it’s possible to make categorical distinctions between art and other media,” Fraser wrote in an email when asked how art can shed light on issues in the news. “The art I make aims not only to communicate content but to activate social structures and relationships in an immediate way, as we experience and participate in these institutions. I might try to do that by creating an immersive installation, or by using performance to explore how institutions are internalized and embodied, or by developing research that is aimed specifically at the conflicting interests of its most likely audience.”