C.R.E.A.M. – An afternoon on Money, Art, Activism, & Intentionality
We’re very excited that two heavyweight minds will be joining us at Beyond Repair’s Assembly space for an afternoon of readings and lectures on Money, Art, Activism, & Intentionality (& More!).
Please join us in welcoming Max Haiven and Cassie Thornton for the launch of Max’s new book from Pluto Press, Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization, and Cassie for Collective Psychic Architecture, an artist talk.
“Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization” book launch with author Max Haiven
From the publisher (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745338248/art-after-money-money-after-art/): We imagine that art and money are old enemies, but this myth actually reproduces a violent system of global capitalism and prevents us from imagining and building alternatives. From the chaos unleashed by the ‘imaginary’ money in financial markets to the new forms of exploitation enabled by the ‘creative economy’ to the way art has become the plaything of the world’s plutocrats, our era of financialization demands we question our romantic assumptions about art and money. By exploring the way contemporary artists engage with cash, debt and credit, Haiven 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.
“Perhaps the most theoretically creative radical thinker of the moment” David Graeber
“Daring, brilliant, provocative. At last a radical critique of the crypto-approach and an abolitionist approach to the problem of money and art” Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakhead University in Northwest Ontario. His books include Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (Zed 2014) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).
“Collective Psychic Architecture” – artist talk with Cassie Thornton
Cassie will discuss a current architectural project in process, (in collaboration with Curator, Taraneh Fazeli) that gives physical form to the invisible, psychological and social ramifications of financialized healthcare and social support. As part of the traveling workshop and exhibition series called “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” Thornton used plain building materials and many hours of help from gallery preparators to produce the physical architecture of financialization, whose invisible powers keep most US residents from getting the care they need to thrive. Collective Psychic Architecture is an opportunity to see, touch, hit or break through the wall that keeps us from seeing or experiencing a world organized around life and health.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the U.S., currently living in Canada. Thornton is currently the co-director of the Reimagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social center at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.
Thornton describes herself as feminist economist. Drawing on social science research methods develops alternative social technologies and infrastructures that might produce health and life in a future society without reproducing oppression — like those of our current money, police, or prison systems.
The Abolition Collective will be holding their inaugural convention this weekend in Minneapolis, and you should definitely find time to attend if you can. And, furthermore, you should come down to the Midtown Global Market – right where we’re at!! – to participate in Cassie Thorton’s Feminist Economics Yoga at 2pm. Woo hoo!! Check it out.
