November 30 - December 1, 2023 – Symposium

Artistic Labour Now

On the equally specific and general, productive and reproductive, material and immaterial nature of this labour type

The symposium will approach modern and contemporary artistic labour from numerous angles, involving Marxist value theories, feminist theories of reproductive labour and contemporary theories of affective and immaterial labour. The relationship between the value-form of the unique art work and the gendered position of its maker will be discussed in relationship to key artists and theorists. The symposium aspires to shed light on the specificity of artistic labour in view of an increasingly globalized and digitized art economy.

Today’s immersive media also create new possibilities for the production and distribution of art and the arrival of virtual reality can even be said to give rise to an immaterial art form of a new kind. Blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies have recently emerged as an expansive sphere in which notions of value, labour and economy in the broadest sense need to be renegotiated.

Program

Thursday, November 30, 2023, 6:00pm–8:00pm
Aula, Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

• Isabelle Graw & Daniel Birnbaum
  Welcome and Introduction
• Silvia Federici
  Rethinking Immaterial Labor and Affective Labor, a Feminist Critique
  Keynote Lecture
• Friederike Sigler
  Art and Reproductive Labor. After Silvia Federici
  Respondent

Friday, December 1, 2023, 2:00pm–8:30pm
Aula, Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

The Materiality and Immateriality of Artistic Labour
2:00–3:15 pm        

• Larisa Dryansky
  Portrait of the Conceptual Artist as a Luddite: Ian Burn and Manual Work
• Christian Berger
  Conceptual Art and/as Immaterial Labor

Artistic Labour versus General Labour
3:30–4:45 pm    

• Jaleh Mansoor
  Art, Index, Labor, Value
• Sabeth Buchmann
  Rehearsing the Value of Performance Labor
• Josh Kline
  Contemporary Labor in Contemporary Art

Slave Labour as Living Labour
5:00–6:15 pm

• Aria Dean
  Money Talk
• Huey Copeland
  All the Things Art History Could Be by Now If Blackness Were its Mother: Notes on Discipline and Value.

Digital Labour
6:30–7:45 pm     

• Michelle Kuo
  Creative Suite
• Simon Denny
  NPC compensation: financial frontiers beyond WoW Gold, Ultima GPs and L$

Closing Remarks
8:00 pm

• Isabelle Graw & Daniel Birnbaum

Concept by Isabelle Graw and Daniel Birnbaum

Artistic Labour Now is made possible by the generous support from Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst. Additional support is provided by Förderprogramm QuiS21 and Digitale Perspektiven in der Kunst.

Contact

Andrés Gorzycki
Project Coordinator
andres.gorzycki@fbk.staedelschule.de
NO REGISTRATION NEEDED