“Art and our Contradictions: Financialization, Protest, Metapolitics, Fragmentation”
We will think about how art is at once entangled within – and embodies – certain broader social and cultural contradictions, even as art (and its various institutional and economic systems) seeks to address societal injustices, inequities, and environmental crisis. If we consider art to be an instrument that claims to offer solutions to various social and political problems, can art accomplish this without generating or reproducing other inequities? There has been a longstanding desire for art to operate in the realm of Realpolitik, for it to function not merely as soft power, but also as hard power, and yet art tends to be suspended in a sort of meta-political or para-political amber. If anything, it may be art as a form of capital (in hyper-financialized times) where a ‘political dimension’ may appear, paradoxically.
Video documentation by Ian Capillé