Research on Value
Working Group coordinator: formally Sharon
Working Group Members: Marsha Bradfield, Kuba Szreder, Neil , Metod
Between 2012-2015, we will work with a wide range of international partners - individuals, associations and institutions, to explore value from various and perhaps even contradictory perspectives. Our research will be embedded, specific and localised, and it is our intention to produce diverse publicly available resources that others can use and develop.
This series aims to:
- (1) Extend our research on value and situate this research
- (2) Aggregate a community for the 'Value' projects/raise CP's profile
We are interested in how values are constituted, sustained, produced, extracted and appropriated. We are tracing what value 'was', what value 'is' and what value 'could be'. Etymologically,'value' derives from the Latin verb valeo/valere, meaning strong / powerful / influential / worthy / healthy.
This research evolved from an earlier Art/Value working group, in response to Critical Malfunction (Gdanks, 2010) as well as the Free/Slow University Warsaw Summit (Warsaw, 2010). There was much talk about value, especially the value of art: What is it? Where does it reside? How is value "marked" (Valeria's value markers). Some useful themes might be:
- (1) Is the value of art irreducible to either exchange value or use value?
- (2) Reducing art's value to purposive purposeless (Adorno) was not something we really entertained. We're instead thinking about art in terms of multiple evaluative processes. Some may be very practical - pragmatic even. (see Superflex's "tools" for instance).
- (3) Value is not entirely subjective. Because evaluation takes place through collective processes, we can speak about the shared value of art in a meaningful way.
- (4) The value of art resides with its capacity to map complex conglomerations of value(s)
- (b) this mapping is performative, which is to say it produces additional/different evaluations.
To valorise something positively means that it prevails against something else. Value has a tendency to be abstracted. We are interested in the intimate, local and social processes of evaluation; who, how, when and where. In this respect we follow in the footsteps of (amongst others) Walter Benjamin to venture into financial centres, cathedrals, museums and galleries of contemporary art, mosques, flea-markets and bars.
- Who: Critical Practice is a cluster of individual artists, researchers, academics and others, supported by Chelsea College of Art & Design, London. Through our Aims we intend to support critical practice within art, the field of culture and organization. We have a longstanding interest in public goods, spaces, services and knowledge, and a track record of producing original participatory events, like PARADE (2008-2010). This international series of events explored the disagreeable, contentious, exhilarating, messy, efficient, live, improvisatory and provisional nature of 'Being in Public'.
A few questions...
- What is 'value'?
- What distinguishes 'value' from 'worth'?
- Through what kinds of historical processes has value been produced?
- What's the relation between socially produced value and culturally produced value and is this a useful distinction?
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ContentsResearch StrandsEvaluation, Consensus and Location 28 - 29 th March 2014We are collaborating with a group of Utopographers, towards an event in the Triangle Exhibition Space at Chelsea College of Art and Design, 28th and 29th March. We have access to the space from the 24th to install a structure to host discursive events within the exhibitionary frame. The theme is Evaluation (to enable Critical Practice to develop it current research strand) Consensus as its problematic for utopians and chimes with our Evaluative Communities and Location as we are all interested in being creatively estranged in time and space. Utopography is about the interactions of space and temporal narrative, the creation of social dreams and the reality of working within and through the environments of the present. The Brokers: People, Spaces and Values. Waste'Waste' is a temporary evaluation made by actors, in a particular economy.
"The Brokers: People, Spaces and Values"We decide to coordinate a series of events/walking tours/discussions entitled "The Brokers: People, Spaces and Values" Each event will be lead by a specific 'Broker/Brokers' and explore how different social practices of evaluation, are situated, localized and embedded in particular places, buildings, public spaces and institutions.
Market of ValuesWe were invited to participate at the Industrial Festival 2013 (working title) – an interdisciplinary festival exploring industrialization, the post-industrial condition and the future of the region of Dortmund/Ruhr. Our involvement had been possible on Kuba's recommendation to Hartware MedianKunstVerein HMKV based in Dortmund and Metod and Kuba were involved in the first working and brainstorming session towards the Industrial Festival 2013 (working title). The festival had been initiated by HMKV artistic director Dr. Inke Arns, Fabian Saavedra-Lara (an independent curator) and Thibaut de Ruyter (an independent curator). The festival has been planned for autumn 2013: 6. September 2013 to 5. January 2014 in Dortmund, Germany Our proposal is for a Market of Values Anatomy of the ProjectFOCUS: VALUE/VALORISATION/EVALUATION is a body of practice-based art research concerned with value as a process. We are especially interested in how it takes shape through valorisation, evaluation and other transformations.
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More Archival
ResourcesThe New Economy of Art – a series of open discussions throughout 2011-12 that focuses on the economic developments and opportunities in the cultural sector that impact on artists, from the perspective of artists. It will share knowledge and provoke action to enable artists to influence the future ecologies and economies in which they operate. The New Economy of Art aims to exchange knowledge and experience with and between artists, explore and uncover the rapid economic developments across the visual arts, and influence the evolving ecologies in which we all operate. Find out more by via this link. ECONOMY is a curatorial project examining the outstanding and increasing visibility of economic relations and their impact on everything that we do or, indeed, are. Since the 1990s, capitalism as a global system has been mutating into an aggressive form of economic reductionism. At this moment in the history of capitalism, rampant economic oppression and a regime of crisis are transforming livelihoods and lives, yet also bringing forth an awareness about the necessity for struggle on all fronts. As a result, a new economic subject is displacing postmodernism’s celebrated cultural subject. But how and where does this take place exactly? Can it be observed in our everyday reality? And does the emergence of an economic subject indicate a new phase in the history of contemporary art? Find out more by following this link Related: * Industrial-Dortmund * "The Brokers: People, Spaces and Values"* Main Page * Art/Value * Meta-thoughts on CP's project on evaluation |
