ART. MONEY.
Wednesday 5th December 2018. 7-9pm
ART. MONEY.
A double book launch with:
Max Haiven launching Art After Money, Money after Art
Oli Mould launching ‘Against Creativity’
In conversation with convenor TBC.
Ticket includes a drink. Buy tickets here.
Art After Money, Money After Art. Max Haiven. Pluto Press. 2018.
We imagine that art and money are old enemies, but this myth actually helps to reproduce a violent system of global capitalism and prevents us from imagining and building alternatives. By exploring the way over 50 radical contemporary artists engage with cash, debt and credit, Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization identifies and assesses a range of creative strategies for mocking, sabotaging, exiting, decrypting and hacking capitalism today. Written for artists, activists and scholars, this book makes an urgent call to unleash the power of the radical imagination by any media necessary.
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). His previous books include Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons, The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life.
Against Creativity. Oli Mould. Verso. 2018.
Everything you have been told about creativity is wrong
From line managers, corporate CEOs, urban designers, teachers, politicians, mayors, advertisers and even our friends and family, the message is “be creative’. Creativity is heralded as the driving force of our contemporary society, celebrated as agile, progressive and liberating. It is the spring of the knowledge economy and shapes the cities we inhabit. It even defines our politics. What could possibly be wrong with this? In this brilliant, counter-intuitive blast, Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation. It is a regime that prioritises individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to recognise anything—job, place, person—that is not profitable. And it impacts on everything around us: the places where we work, the way we are managed, how we spend our leisure time. Is there an alternative? Mould offers a radical redefinition of creativity, one embedded in the idea of collective flourishing, outside the tyranny of profit. Bold, passionate and refreshing, Against Creativity, is a timely correction to the doctrine of our times.
Oli Mould is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work focuses on issues of urban activism, social theory and creative resistance. He is the author of Urban Subversion and the Creative City and blogs at tacity.co.uk.