[artinfo] CEU Summer University I Commoning Art and Culture

[Kristóf Nagy]

*Commoning Art and Culture Summer University at the Central European
University (Budapest) *

Course date: 19 June - 29 June, 2021
Application deadline: 14 February, 2021
Details, application:
https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/commoning-art-and-culture-2021

This course asks how and why art and open societies have sustained each
other across history, and how they may continue to do so beyond the crisis
they jointly undergo in the current context of rapid technological,
economic and political transformation. While focusing more specifically on
artistic production, on its present crisis, and its possible futures, this
course puts art in the broader perspective of the history of cultural
production, and of its social, political and economic conditions of
possibility at the modern intersection of state and market. Instrumental in
this project is the conceptual lens of the “common(s),” a notion that has
always been defining cultural production in the modern era in one way or
another (as a common good, as a public good, as a human right, e.g.); one,
however, that has recently gained new meanings and dramatic currency since
the digital turn in media and the financial turn in economics. Digitization
and financialization, commodify, segment, and often alienate ever larger
segments of our private lives and democratic public spheres. In response to
these threats, theories of the commons and practices of commoning coming
from the digital and art worlds are transforming the goals and means of
art, politics, and economics on the margins of the old state-market
infrastructure.