Art Value

Vygandas Simbelis / Sweden

KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

simbelis.com

The project “Art Value” examines the notion of political economy and neoliberal values in the art processes, ie production, circulation and consumption. The economy standards and its influences to the art world and to creation in general is a key theme of the project. Critically appropriating principles of such dichotomy discourse, the artist seeks for a synthesis between those two different and opposite paradigms. The viewer of the exhibition is invited to rethink the existing connotations of those philosophical assumptions, elevating the moral and aesthetic values.

It is a speculative project questioning artwork's reception and perception through economic principles, ie through rethinking the notion of the artwork as commodity. It is also a critique of one of the main characteristics of the contemporary art world – the segregation of the art world and its public escalation of the monetary values.

“Art Value” is taking place through the exhibition of numbers. This aesthetic turn is examining the contemporary notion of contemporary human (post-human), who radically and decisively believes in numbers. Questioning the exponentially growing trust in numbers and data, its inclusion in everyday life, abstraction and unification of everything that is around us, also through what is digitized, coded and quantified.