Art, Debt, Creativity, Struggle: Resistance to Financialization in the Speculative Times

Talk by Max Haiven
Thursday, October 16 2014, 7pm
Presented by SFU Institute for the Humanities at Publication Studio Vancouver, 222 East Georgia Street, Vancouver BC

How does debt and today’s debt-driven capitalism shape or inhibit creativity and the lives and communities of artists, poets, designers, performers and other creative people? How has debt-driven capitalism conscripted or consumed the idea of creativity for its own purposes, spinning dangerous myths of “creative capitalism,” the “creative class,” “creative destruction” and “creative cities”? How can we create new creative forms of solidarity to confront and overcome a system that is constricting our individual and collective futures? How are artists and others confronting and reimagining debt as a radical act of refusal? What might life beyond debt look like and feel like? How can we get there from here?

Max Haiven is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. His research focuses on themes including the financialization of society and culture, social movements and the radical imagination, the politics and economics of culture, critical art practices, and social and cultural theory. He is author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (Zed Books, 2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish, Zed Books, 2014) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).