engleski

Economy, Literature and Art: Creating Value and Meaning

The economy, traditionally understood as a field and the practice of production, consumption and distribution of merchandise, penetrates every section of the human life. It not only dominates the language and practices of the political elites but enters the university administration (e.g. funding projects), the school and preschool system (e.g. academies of success for preschool kids, etc.), spirituality (e.g. the industry of the ‘self-help’ genre), and it has always been closely connected with art in multiple ways. The aim of this paper is to question the relationship between the economy and art as a research subject and practice in various genres, contexts and in relation to different problems. The general assumptions are that: a) economic processes create a living reality at almost all levels and therefore find their specific articulation in the artistic imagination ; b) at an early stage, art as an institution has shown its character as being linked to commodification, with a dependency on economic processes such as production, distribution and consumption ; c) contemporary economic thought takes art into account, especially the literature that offers a more complex understanding of economic processes, which indicates the inadequacy of narrowly defined economic knowledge, which should be added to ; d) contemporary processes within the sphere of financial capital demonstrate an almost fictional quality in which the economy moves away from the reality of production and unwinds on the terrain of speculative money or money based on illusory foundations, processes which have recently caused numerous crises on global and local levels and is often thematised in art (literary texts, movies, music). By mapping the various ways in which art, literature and the economy are interconnected, the presentation will open the discussion with the specific role the humanities have in understanding the economy, posing questions such as: what can the humanities and art say about the economy ; what kind of specific ‘knowledge’ and ‘values’ can art and the humanities create and how can art exist in today’s capitalist economy?

economy, literature, art, humanities

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