Max Haiven

„Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization“ (AaMMaA) explores the work on contemporary artists on the ragged edges of conventional “art” practice who use money as a medium of creative and critical expression. Through an examination of this work, which engages with cash and credit, debt, derivatives and other manifestations of money, we can better understand our current moment of “financialization”: the increasing domination of the economy and social life by the financial sector. Written for activists, artists and art professionals and scholars, AaMMaA pivots on the controversial claim that both money and art must be abolished if we want a truly creative economy, which is to say an economy where everyone’s imagination can thrive.

AaMMaA features and examines the work of dozens of artists. Chapter one explores the strategies of artists who use coins, banknotes and other forms or representations of money to explore both art and money are forms of capitalist mediation. Chapter two contrasts the money-oriented work of three artists in the later 60s and three after the 2008 financial crash to see what financialization has changed. Chapter three follows the strategies of artists using participatory methods to explore and critique money today. And the final chapter grapples with the question of how the financialization of art markets reveals a much more profound shift in the underlying nature of capitalism and society.

About the author

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He writes articles for both academic and general audiences and is the author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons, The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. He is currently working on a book titled Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization.