Guest lecture by Dr. Simone Wesner, Birbeck College, London: "Visual Artists and the 'work' of Art"

As part of her guest stay at the Institute of Sociology, Dr. Wesner will give a lecture on artistic 'work' on Thu. 19.6.2025, 2 pm in room FAL 232. Her stay serves her long-term study on artists and cultural policy makers in Saxony.

Abstract: "Policy makers and analysts scrutinise affinities and commonalities in the experience of workers across the creative industries, but the distinctive elements of different forms of creative work have become somewhat glossed/implicit. This talk takes a fresh look at the meaning of creative work by questioning and analyzing the relationship between visual artists, art and work. Key paradoxes related to self-expression, autonomy, embodied nature and immateriality in the scholarly debates about creative work are revisited. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the discussion reconnects debates about the creative economy with fundamental questions about the nature and value of creativity itself in contemporary societies. Arendt framed work through distinctions between thought and cognition within the context of a work of art. Accounts of artistic work from the Visual Artists Cohort Study in Saxony/Germany resonated with Arendt's relational conceptualizations of work and are discussed as motivating and driving characteristic of artists' careers. The focus on the careers of visual artists allows for some explicit re-connection with debates about art itself as an exemplary form of creativity and about artists as a distinctive form of worker within the creative economy, challenging assumptions and rationalities about what 'work' itself is and how and why it might be supported."