‘the creative class doesn’t exist’ #arts #artspace #cognitivecapitalism

‘the creative class doesn’t exist’
With Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos
Location: Artspace

In Sydney for one public event only: Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos in dialogue on artists, precarity and collective experimentation.

The changing boundaries between work and leisure, the conquering of distance via tele-technologies and the exponential expansion of the culture industries in the late twentieth century are supposed to have created a new ‘creative class’. People who work in the media, the Internet, museums and the entertainment industry seemingly comprise this engine-room of neoliberalism. Yet the segmented and differential nature of these industries generates a situation where most artists, for example, declare an income from their activities that falls below the poverty line. Contrary to the idea that the creative class embodies the values and privileges of the expanding creative industries, many artists and art workers instead find themselves in the same boat as intermittent, casualised and precarious workers.

In this conversation between the sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato and the artist Angela Melitopoulos, a space opens up for questioning the current place of artists and of ‘creativity’ within cognitive capitalism. They discuss the contradiction deep at the heart of creative industries and contemporary cognitive capitalism: the erasure of non-productive time, which is precisely the time required for creation to take place at all. They debate the question, initiated by Marcel Duchamp, of how ‘an-artist’, rather than the Artist, might function to open up new ways of feeling, doing and saying and of experimenting with new institutions that might promote different forms of collective creation.

Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist and philosopher who lives and works in Paris. Among his recent publications are: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettivita (1997); Videofilosofia. Percezione e lavoro nel postfordismo (1997); Tute Bianche. Disoccupazione di massa et reddito di cittadinanza (1999); Post-face à Monadologie et sociologie (1999); Puissance de l’invention. La psychologie economique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’economie politique (2002); Les Revolutions du capitalisme (2004).

Angela Melitopoulos, is an time-based artist, realizes video-essays, installations, documentaries and sound pieces and curates exhibitions and seminars. Her work focuses on duration and mnemonic micro-processes in documentation. Her work has been shown in many international video and film festivals, exhibitions and museums (Antonin Tapies Foundation Barcelona, Manifesta 7, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Whitney Museum New York). Currently she is a research fellow at the Matrix East Lab in the University of East London.

6 July 2010, 6:00pm
ARTSPACE

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