Art/Work: On Aesthetics and Labor

Graduate / Professional

Since the 1980s, so-called “postfordistic forms of labor” have increasingly replaced the production processes of industrial good manufacturing in modern information societies and service economies. These new forms of work bear a remarkable resemblance to the ways the artist and artistic processes have been understood in aesthetic discourses since the end of the eighteenth century. The course explores this relation between art and labor from two different angles. (1) It gives an historic overview over the development from ancient concepts of leisure and contemplation to a modern understanding of work as anthropologically crucial and the role art and aesthetic concepts did play in it. (2) It discusses contemporary literature and theories on “new capitalism”, forms of subjectification, and discourses of creativity with regard to their connection to aesthetics around 1800, while also addressing the question of how this development is currently being decisively changed once again by AI. TTh 1:30pm-3:25pm