Artists, what is your value? Jan Verwoert on Seduction Value and Metabolism

Critic Jan Verwoert presents on 'seduction value' and art. Considering that much of the art of the last decade concerns the production of displays, or as Verwoert puts it, "the infinite expert button-pushing on the keyboard of collective desire production", with this talk he journeys from Minimal mirror cubes to contemporary forms of Machiavellian window dressing, in search of a way out: the offer to eat all you can is not enough when you know you need something first to reboot your metabolism!

This presentation is the first event in ICA Talks series: Artists, what is your value? Replicating productivist injunctions for creative practitioners to serve as entrepreneurs, repeatedly proving and performing their own worth, these talks goad artists, critics and theorists to make estimations regarding the worth of art and artists in the current age. In the wake of escalating markets, soaring education costs and diminishing state subsidies, these examine artists’ negotiations between life, work and art systems.

This series was originally conceived in collaboration with Andrea Phillips, Professor in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, based in Berlin and Oslo. He is a contributing editor of Frieze, his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He is a professor for theory at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, and the de Appel curatorial programme.
He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006), the essay collection Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want (Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010) together with Michael Stevenson, Animal Spirits — Fables in the Parlance of Our Time (Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013) and a second collection of his essays Cookie! published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2014.