Art/Work: On creativity, culture and labor under capitalism.
What we call art is the container in which we put those passions and energies that we associate with creativity and imagination. So art is needed because it's a box within capitalism where we dump a bunch of stuff the capitalists don't want infecting the rest of the economy. If we actually got to express our creativity and imagination in terms of how we organize society - that's a form of socialism or anarchism. That's not capitalism.
Writer Max Haiven explores the deep connections between art and money under capitalism - from the grim, ubiquitous exploitation of creativity in service of the ruling class, to the warping of labor, value and collectivism in a neoliberal era of widespread worker precarity and the dominance of financial logic as societal organization.
Max is author of Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization from Pluto Press.
Guest
Max Haiven
Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario and director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).
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