Tom McCarthy will be talking at the Goethe-Institut in New York on 5 December as part of a series called “What is the Good of Work?”. Tom tells us that his answer will be “largely negative”.
Wyoming Evenings: What Is the Good of Work? (2/4)
Talk with Marion von Osten and Tom McCarthy
Talk series
12/05/09
4:00pm
Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street (at Bowery)
New York, NY 10003
English
$10 and $25 (brownpapertickets.com)
Tel.: +1 (212) 439-8700
What is the good of work? How and why did the future change from the sixties and seventies vision of a leisure society to an exhausting life of increasingly purposeless work? What are the implications of the shift from a Fordist model of production to a post-Fordist one? Why is work valorized in contemporary society? What happened to the critique of labor and its radical potential from the Middle Ages up through the strategies of the Situationists and others? As unemployment becomes an increasing reality, how might we think of unemployment as an artistic and philosophical category?
These questions will be examined during four events at the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building in the East Village. Each event will involve two guests — one artist and one cultural producer of another kind. Marion von Osten and Tom McCarthy will be the guests at the second event on December 5.
Marion von Osten is an artist, curator, and theorist of culture and the arts. Her main fields of interest are the changed conditions of cultural work in neo-liberal and post-colonial societies, the governance of mobility and colonial and global modernity. Her engagement with the productivity of artistic, creative, and media-activist methods for generating new public spheres within and outside the art context is reflected in theoretical, artistic, and curatorial approaches. She has been a Professor for Art and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2006. Tom McCarthy is an artist and writer. His novel Remainder won the Believer Book Award 2007 and is currently being adapted for cinema. The ’semi-fictitous avant-garde art organization’ he founded in 1999, the International Necronautical Society, emerges sporadically through publications, proclamations, media interventions and more conventional art exhibitions. His new novel, C, will be published by Knopf in 2010.
Wyoming Evenings is organized by the Goethe-Institut New York and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and curated by Maria Lind and Simon Critchley.
Maria Lind is a curator and critic, currently holding the position of director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Prior to coming to Bard, she directed the Kunstverein München (2002-4) and IASPIS in Stockholm (2005-7). This fall, Sternberg Press is publishing a book with her writings from the last 15 years. Simon Critchley is a Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He works in the history of philosophy, Continental philosophy, ethics and political theory. He is the author of ten books, including Very Little…Almost Nothing (1997), On Humor (2002), Infinitely Demanding (2007) and On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008). The Book of Dead Philosophers was published by Vintage in 2009 and was a New York Times bestseller. It is alleged that he is Chief Philosopher of the International Necronautical Society.
[Related: The importance of doing nothing.]
First posted: Friday, November 6th, 2009.
