Will Bradley & Jordan Kantor Discuss "Art as Commodity, Art as Culture"

Art as Commodity, Art as Culture:
A Contradiction We All Have to Deal With
Speakers: Will Bradley, Jordan Kantor

Series:
The New New Masses
Discussions About Art and Politics

Location
San Francisco Art Institute Café
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

October 13 at 7:00pm
free and open to the public


Artists are producers of both commodities and cultural artifacts—how does one affect the other? What strategies have artists employed to make art that satisfies their need to bite the hand that feeds them? Political art can become chic, but does it remain sharp? How does the art market shape art? These tensions have been observed and experienced for centuries, but they continue to exist and evolve—we want to promote a discussion about the current incarnations and strategies that artists employ to navigate this terrain.

Will Bradley is a visiting Professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He co-founded the Modern Institute in Glasgow and writes for Frieze, Afterall, and Metropolis. He has curated many exhibitions including My Head is on Fire but my Heart is Full of Love at Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, and Pyramids of Mars at the Barbican, London. Bradley is currently working on an anthology of essays and artists’ writings, Art and Social Change—1871 to the Present, for Afterall books, and editing a book entitled Self Organisation/Counter-Economic Strategies in collaboration with the Danish artist group Superflex. He has curated two exhibitions for the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco: Radical Software; and How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, which opens in November 2006.

Jordan Kantor is an artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts, where he teaches both art practice and theory. He has written extensively on contemporary art, and is a frequent contributor to Artforum.