The ephemeral, unsaleable artwork has become so prominent that the traditional art market, which values commodity over context, is becoming utterly divorced from the sociopolitical climate in which art is happening. The act of exhibiting work that is not-for-sale suggests a departure from our history of material culture and a paradigm shift in what motivates the artist to produce. Reflecting our emergence into the information age, the aesthetic value and materiality of the art object are no longer guaranteed. Contemporary art has social, pedagogical and even metaphysical properties. And, while these are all virtuous expansions that enrich the surrounding culture, they do little to reshape its stratified economy. To create a more accurate picture of an art market, we must first redefine what we consider value, how we consider labour, and perhaps (most begrudgingly) where authenticity comes into the mix.

Possible topics and sub-topics include:

(Re)Positioning artistic labour
— Professionalization of the ‘arts worker’
— Delineating activism and social practice

Rapid growth of the contemporary art market
— Paying it forward—art as investment capital
— “Art Stars”/ Celebrity and status in determining worth
— The role of auction houses as arbiters of taste

Strategies for selling the “unsellable”
— Appraising and determining authorship in performance and relational aesthetics
— Digital reproduction (where is the aura?)
— ‘Owning’ art on the Net or other distributed mediums
— The value of the act vs. the documentation

Art & Capitalism
— The ‘Exhibition Value’ of an artwork (a redefinition of use value)
— Commodification of the Artist (as opposed to the work)
— Alternative economies—Is it possible for art to exist outside a capitalist framework? In being not-for-sale, does art evade commodity fetishism?

Electronic submissions (of final papers and more tentative proposals) will be accepted until June 20th, 2014, at submissionskapsula.ca.