[ecrea] Crafting Values: Art and its Economies/ Symposium, January 23, 2015, University of Edinburgh

Symposium

Crafting Values: Art and its Economies


January 23, 2015/ School of Art, Edinburgh College of Art, University of 
Edinburgh (Hunter Lecture Theatre)


with Hans Abbing, Evangelos Chrysagis, The Confraternity of 
Neoflaggelants (Norman James Hogg and Neil Mulholland), Angela 
McClanahan, Georgios Papadopoulos, Stevphen Shukaitis, Marina Vishmidt, 
Panos Kompatsiaris (organizer)


Taking its cue from debates surrounding the contested character of value 
in artistic production, this one-day symposium presents an 
interdisciplinary take on the issue by bringing together scholarship 
from the fields of anthropology, art and critical theory, Marxism and 
economics. Some of the areas that the participants will address include 
the following:


Aesthetic value and processes of urban regeneration

Speculation and art production

Ethical values and economies of affect

Emotional labour, entrepreneurialism and self-precarization

Technologies of value and digital media

Neo-medievalism and hyper-economies


For more information please visit https://craftingvalues.wordpress.com/


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Summary


Crafting Values: Art and its Economies


In one of its recent news reports, the Canadian radio show ‘This Is 
That’, a program dedicated to fabricating issues on current affairs, 
released a pseudo-documentary titled ‘New York artist creates art that 
is invisible and collectors are paying millions’, according to which a 
27-year old artist creates ‘invisible art’, an art that is meant to 
solely exist in the creator’s imagination rather than assume some 
tangible form. On the night of the opening, as the pseudo-report 
describes, the ‘who-is-who’ of the art world ended up looking at ‘blank 
walls’ as the works were physically present solely through the brain 
processes of the artist and audience.


The on-going disassociation of art from handcraft technique and its 
reliance on public relations invokes a wider problematic related to the 
art object, its proclaimed immateriality and adjacent value regimes 
within capitalism. In recent critical art theory, the concept of value 
is often framed through the perspective of (neo) Marxist political 
economy, where the valorization of artistic labour is regarded as a 
typical example of the turn to immaterial production, and/ or through 
anthropological approaches that are more attentive to the everyday 
practices through which objects, symbols and forms are invested with 
desire and social usefulness. On the one hand, value, in the 
anthropological sense, rather than being universal, is fragile, shifting 
and potentially contested, having to do with the ways that specific 
social arrangements conceptualise the world and its phenomena. Here, 
value is understood as an outcome of emotional investments, shared 
beliefs and relations of trust between members of societies, networks or 
communities. However, the idea of value as a social construct risks 
overlooking the processes through which value assumes a specific 
‘value-form’ under capitalist relations of production, manifested for 
instance in the capitalist-specific need of workers to valorize their 
products and services or entrepreneurially develop themselves as brands 
within a competitive and ever-expanding marketplace. In addition to 
this, the recent turn to the ontology of the object in continental 
theory poses new challenges to the idea of value as social construction 
by bringing to the fore questions of substance, materiality and efficacy 
in relation to processes of value-formation.


This one-day symposium seeks to bring together such perspectives and 
voices from social and cultural theory, as well as assess wider 
questions of value formation in respect to art and its economies.



Panos Kompatsiaris

Ph.D. candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies
Edinburgh College of Art
University of Edinburgh

71 South Clerk St., 3F3
EH8 9PP, Edinburgh
Tel: 01314680628
Mob: (0044) 7733236836

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