Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent, België

Programma and schedule Buy Buy Art

13.00 – 15.30: session 1 – Lectures (in English) (Robrecht Vanderbeeken / KASK, chair)

Presentations on art as a commodity: value, virtual economics and ownership

• Frank vande Veire – The fetish character of the work of art and its secret
• Julian Dibbell – Play Money: Online Games, Ludocapitalism, and the Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer
• Evi Werkers – Copyright: a curse or a blessing?

15.30 – 16.00: break

16.00 – 18.00: session 2 – Talks (in Dutch and French) (Hans Martens / HISK, chair)

Discussions on art investment, collecting, selling and financial support

• Stefaan De Ruyck / general director, Vooruit / on CultuurInvest (in Dutch)
• Herman Daled / collector, chair Wiels, Brussels / on Collecting Contemporary Art (in French)
• Mieke Mels / art historian / on Collecting art, the public and the private
• Adriaan Raemdonck / Galerie De Zwarte Panter Antwerp, chair Bup (union of galleries) / on Galleries in Belgium
• Tatjana Pieters / Onetwenty Gallery Gent / on being a young gallery holder today

18.00 – 19.30: dinner

19.30 – 22.00: session 3 – Round tables

19.30 – 20.30: Put your money where your art is! Comparing different art forms

• Koen Gisen (moderator)
• Superamas (live arts)
• Eugene Chadbourne (composer)
• Christophe Bruno (media art)

20.30 – 20.50: break

20.50 – 21.50: A dollar green art scene? The economics of fine art

• Johan Pas (moderator)
• Koen van den Broek, Hans Op de Beeck and Guillaume Bijl (fine arts)

Abstracts of the lectures:

Frank vande Veire – The fetish character of the work of art and its secret

“In what consists, to paraphrase Marx, the fetish character of the strange kind of commodity the work of art has become? What fascinates in the contemporary art work is the gap between its enormous exchange value and its manifest lack of use value. Investing in art is therefore not just a ‘misuse’ of art in favour of economic interest; the work of art, being of no concrete use, semantically and aesthetically highly indeterminate, in itself materialises the kind of abstraction that is proper to money. In that sense the art market reveals the irrational potlatch that is at work in the heart of capitalism.”

Bio: Frank Vande Veire teaches philosophy and aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Art in Ghent (KASK). In 1997, he received an important award (de Vlaamse Cultuurprijs voor kunstkritiek) particularly for his book: De geplooide voorstelling. Essays over kunst. Since then, he published a retrospective aesthetical survey: Als in een donkere spiegel. De kunst in de moderne filosofie (2002) and a collection of critical philosophical essays: Neem en eet, dit is je lichaam. Fascinatie en intimidatie in de hedendaagse cultuur (2005).

Julian Dibbell – Play Money: Online Games, Ludocapitalism, and the Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer

“Every day in China tens of thousands of people work 12-hour shifts playing the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for approximately thirty cents an hour, and one day not too long ago, I was one of them. One Western gamer’s brief taste of the Chinese gold farmer’s daily experience can only just begin to convey the lived reality of that experience, of course, but for me, those twelve hours on the day shift brought into focus a set of increasingly urgent questions about contemporary, online play. Can we ever say, in digital gaming spaces, where the playful ends and the serious begins? Can the uses of serious play — whether for educational, political, or economic ends — ever fail to do violence to play itself? And in our eagerness to defend games from the charges of both frivolity and antisociality, do we not miss the chance to critique play’s central role in an emerging socioeconomic order that might best be called ludocapitalism? If, in short, the gold farmer is the ultimate serious player, must we not then recognize in “serious play” a problem as much as a solution? Beginning with a slide-show walk-through of my day on the gold farm, this talk will open out into the broader questions it provoked and invite the audience to pose its own.”

Bio: www.juliandibbell.com

Evi Werkers – Copyright: a curse or a blessing?

“The past ten years copyright has been subject to considerable changes. Whereas in earlier times copyright was manageable either by rightholders themselves or by copyright societies, digitization and especially the emergence of the internet has led to a borderless world where the free flow of information, creative content production and public domain flourish more than even before. New technologies have always caused panic amongst traditional content providers even though new technologies never disrupted creative content distribution, but rather complemented old distribution channels and provided new economic opportunities for copyright holders. The legislator has been quite active since the nineties to modernize copyright in order to provide a better protection to rightholders in a quick evolving technological context where piracy is lurking behind the corner. This has led to a considerable extension of the scope of application of copyright and of the traditional exploitation rights of authors, performers, producers and broadcasters (reproduction, communication to the public, distribution, resale). On the other hand the European copyright legislation foresees several exceptions to safeguard the interests of society and users. Despite the legislator’s efforts, however, the balance between copyright holders and users seems to be significantly disturbed and several problems rise. There is a growing strained relation between on the one hand copyright protection and rightholders seeking for a way to exploit their works and earn their income and on the other hand the right of users to have free access to information and ideas, to make use of works in various ways and to freely express themselves and create new things. Will artists be able to maintain the copyright protection granted to them by the legislator? Can the balance between rightholders and users be restored or should copyright be abolished as a whole and should we seek for flexible and practical solutions such as the voluntary Creative Commons licenses?”

Bio: Evi Werkers obtained her degree as Master in Law in 2004 and an advanced degree as Master in Cultural Management in 2005. In November 2005 she started working as a Legal Researcher at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Law and ICT (ICRI – K.U. Leuven – IBBT) where she specializes in copyright and media law. For more information please visit the following link