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Essay in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art series on Speculation


Our essay “Sketches from a Secession” will be published by MIT Press for the Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art series Speculation edited by Marina Vishmidt.

Engaging with the question of speculation in ways that encompass the artistic, the economic, and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, this collection approaches the theme as a powerful logic of contemporary life whose key instantiations are art and finance. …In this context, the artist is seen as a speculative subject and a paragon of creativity—the diametrical opposite of the bean-counter obsessed with balance sheets and value added. However, once social reality becomes speculative and opaque in its own right—risky, algorithmic, and overhauled by networked markets—what becomes of the distinction between not just art and finance but art and life?