Dave Beech is an artist in the collective Free (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan)\ , as well as a writer and curator. He studied painting at Leicester Polytec hnic and Cultural Theory the Royal College of Art\, where he researched the historical development of the concept of philistinism from Romanticism to Postmodernism.
He has written widely on the politics of art\, includi ng ‘The Philistine Controversy’ (Verso\, 2002\, co-authored with John Rober ts) and editing a special edition of Third Text (‘Art\, Politics\, Resistan ce?’\, Vol 16\, Issue 4\, No 6)\, as well as the legacy of the Avant-Garde and Conceptualism\, most recently in ‘Art and Text’ (Blackdog Books\, 2011) . He has also contributed to debates on participation and art’s publics\, i n books such as ‘In Search of Art’s New Publics’ and ‘The Pedagogical Turn’ \, as well as being a founding editor of the journal ‘Art and the Public Sp here’ (Intellect Publishing\, from 2011). Other publications include the MI T/Whitechapel book 'Beauty' and his latest book\, Art and Value is forthcom ing from Brill's Historical Materialism Book Series. As an artist he has ex hibited at the Liverpool Biennial\, BAK\, Utrecht as part of the major rese arch project ‘The Former West’\, Smart Project Space\, Amsterdam\, and the forthcoming Istanbul Biennial. He also curated the exhibition ‘We Are Gramm ar’ at the Pratt Institute\, New York 2011 (co-curator Paul O’Neill).
“The first thing that I want to say about the manner in which art and value converge is that to speak about values in art is to proceed without c ertainty. There is a palpable hesitancy in the manner by which values are a scribed to art. This\, I want to insist\, is not in any way as a sign of a lack of commitment or lack of confidence but rather as a sign of one’s sens itivity. One speaks of value in art with a tone of studied indeterminacy. W hile art is a prominent public sphere in which value judgements are formed and exchanged\, it is simultaneously so dominated by subjective and individ ual judgements that value\, we might say\, is often hedged out of existence . And yet\, this hedging is itself an embodiment of value. We need to think more carefully about the preeminence of hesitancy in artistic judgement in order to understand the kind of values that it promotes and how these valu es are embodied. A cynic might easily fashion a caricature of the dithering aesthete in order to call the whole enterprise into question but there is something important in this indeterminacy\, something that any study of the relationship between art and value has to take seriously."
As p art of the Distinguished Visiting Artist Program\, Beech w ill discuss the historical and theoretical structure of his argument in Art and Value. Beech's book presents a sustained analysis of art's treatment ( and mistreatment) by classical economics\, neoclassical economics\, and in more recent years by the renewed interest in art demonstrated by finance ca pital and postfordist theory\, to offer a history of the contentious relati on between artistic and economic value as well as a critique of those theor etical motifs to which this relation has tended to be reduced in art theory .
"The history of the Marxist analysis of art has been firmly ali gned with the theory of art's commodification\, industrialization\, commerc ialization\, spectacularization and incorporation. My intention throughout this book has been to explore art’s relationship to capitalism without rely ing on the established sociological methods of Western Marxism which have s upported the claim that art has been incorporated into capitalism without p roviding any economic proof that artistic production has been transformed i nto capitalist commodity production. My method\, here\, has been to establi sh art’s relationship to capitalism through an analysis of its relation to capital. I have drawn on Marxism’s classical roots\, particularly the three volumes of Capital\, to investigate the economics of art and found that th e claims made by Western Marxism of art’s commodification within the Cultur e Industry has no basis in the actual economic conditions of artistic pract ice. The processes by which non-capitalist production is converted into cap italist production – which Marx theorized through the twin concepts of the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital – has not taken place i n the case of art. Artists have not become wage labourers\, the means of pr oduction of art are not owned by the capitalist class\, no productive capit al plays any role whatsoever in the production of art. What’s more\, mercha nt capitalists do not purchase artworks as commodity-capital\, nor do artwo rks function conventionally or adequately as financial assets. As such\, ar tists and artworks encounter money in various forms\, but capital plays an extremely limited role\, and in the majority of cases no role at all\, in t he production and circulation of art. While mainstream economics is happy t o assert that art is a commodity almost like any other\, the Marxist econom ic analysis of art demonstrates not only that art is economically exception al but that it is exceptional to the capitalist mode of production in parti cular."
(Excerpts from Art and Value\, Historical Materialism Bo ok Series\, forthcoming.)
http://dbfr eee.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/van-abbemuseum-talk-for-giant-step-4/
< p>http://www.paradiserow.com/usr/d ocuments/press/download_url/231/margarita_gluzberg_art_monthly_010311.pdfhttp://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=q5b1YYfLrTg&deskto p_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dq5b1YYfLrTg
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