Benjamin Noys: The Art of Capital: Artistic Identity and the Paradox of Valorisation
Channel: SkriptaTV
Date: 2013-01-09

Benjamin Noys The Art of Capital: Artistic Identity and the Paradox of Valorisation

20.06.2011 19:00,
net.culture club mama,
Preradovićeva 18, Zagreb

The paradox of the artist's self-valorisation is simple: on the one hand, it coincides with capitalism's self-valorisation -- artistic practice has become the model for contemporary labour: fluid, precarious, creative, mobile, etc. On the other hand, the artist seems to exceed capitalism and prefigure non-capitalist or communist social relations: the refusal of alienated work, an excessive creativity, and play. The emergence of 'aesthetic capitalism' seems to have tipped the balance of this paradox towards subordinating the artist to capitalism. Tracing the analysis of this situation through the theorisations of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière, I explore the contradictions and tensions of their explorations of the 'communist moment' in artistic self-valorisation -- from Negri's model of the reversible moment of subjection to creation, Badiou's thesis of the moment of subtraction from capitalist through independent affirmation, and Rancière's suggestion of aesthetic dissension and refiguring that rejects the absolutisation of capital. While such theorisations attempt to retain the communist moment of artistic self-valorisation, I suggest that they find their limit in a tendency to not fully engage with the 'real abstractions' that generate the paradox of value. It is these forms of abstraction, revealed through the denuding effects of the contemporary financial crisis, that require traversal to engage with the capillary effects of capitalist power. 

Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg 2005), and The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh UP 2010). He has also written extensively on contemporary theory, visual culture, artistic practice and cultural politics. 

The methodologies of valorisation is one of this year's Centre for Drama Art's main programs. It consists of a series of lectures dedicated to theoretical and historical investigation of relations between criteria and methods of valorisation in the artistic field and in the broader political and economic sphere. We will deal with the articulations of differences, coincidences, conditionalities, shortcuts, ideological juxtapositions and historical and geographical specificities.

Supported by: City of Zagreb Office for Culture, Education and Sport; Ministry of Culture, Republic of Croatia; IPA 2009 Programme -- Civil Society Facility. 

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