Drunk on Capitalism. An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Market Economy, Art and Science

(Eds.) Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Frederik Le Roy, Christel Stalpaert and Diederik Aerts

This interdisciplinary collection of analyses discusses the impact of market economy on art and science in the post-Berlin Wall era. The first part, Science for Sale, focuses on the alliance of contemporary science and education with private funding, and how this contributes to the commodification of knowledge. The underlying questions are: Does economic power eclipse freedom of knowledge? When science and education become enterprises, what are the risks of selling off patented knowledge, of rhetorical abuse for business purposes or a commercialisation of symbolic capital? The second part, Buy Buy Art, elaborates on the multiple and ambiguous relations between art and money. Contemporary art claims to be autonomous. But art costs money and artists cannot live from their love of art alone. How do artists respond to the increase of economic conditions in our culture in general and the art market in particular? What is the value of a work of art now that it has also become an investment? Finally, what role is left for art in global, late-capitalist society?

Note: this reader really is a drunkard. The articles can be bought online separately as a pdf from Springer's website. Only 40 euro each! Science for sale: point proven? Research for this book was funded by taxpayers and the main consumers are the university libraries. If scholars want to publish with professional academic publishers, communities have to pay twice. At the end of the book there is included a book project by Julian Dibbell that is to be situated on the other side of the spectrum: making a book without the help of a professional publisher (see also here).

Note also that the initial design of the book – with images of the day plans by artist Heath Bunting in between texts – was abandoned in order to make an online sale of papers possible. (Why make a book anyway, if online presale is the new academic standard?) As discussed in the introduction, Heath Bunting is an artist who, when he became famous more then a decade ago, decided not to sell his work as commodities. Nonetheless, Springer insisted to sell the manual of his project as a separate text for 25 euro (the images of the day plans not included). The manual also refers to Bunting's website where the images can be found for free, as well as the manual (see here).

The screen shot of the Springer page that offers the opportunity to buy the pdf of Bunting's manual (see below) nicely summarizes the theme of the book: art and science for sale. Looking back, this image should have been the cover.

This reader is based on the input of two symposia: Science For Sale and Buy Buy Art (for more information and web-video see www.interface.ugent.be under 'activities')

This reader is part of the series Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society. Volume 11, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-2082-4)

Available at: Springerlink.com and Amazon.

More info: www.interface.ugent.be