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CFP: Art/Money/Crisis

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How does art respond to financial crisis? What can art teach us about the economy? Can art predict, intuit, or explain the global market?

We are pleased to announce ‘Art/Money/Crisis’, a two-day interdisciplinary conference, to be held at the University of Cambridge in April 2016.

There was nothing new about the economic crisis of 2008-09: capitalist financial markets are inherently turbulent, and cycles of boom and bust have alternated with one another for hundreds of years. Art/Money/Crisis will bring together theorists and practitioners from across the humanities to question how artistic responses to crisis contribute to our understanding of why economies ‘go wrong’.

The conference will be structured around presentations given by leading critics and artists working in the fields of literature, sociology, visual arts, film, music, and theatre. A series of multi-disciplinary panels, composed of papers given by academics, early career researchers, and graduate students, will compliment these talks. Throughout the event, plenty of time will be allocated for discussion so as to foster dialogue and debate amongst participants.

Contributions for 15 to 20 minute papers on all areas of financial crisis are welcome. Our focus will be upon modern financial markets (loosely defined as post-1720), with particular consideration of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We invite papers from all disciplines, including, but not limited to:

literature / sociology / music / history of art / visual arts / film / theatre / economic history / history / linguistics / anthropology / media / politics / performance

Papers may, without being limited to these subjects, address the following:

art as commodity / value / the language of crisis / communicating crisis / defining crisis / money: as token, symbol, currency / representing financial markets / expansion and decline / art and crisis in dialogue / the art of protest / market constraints and creative freedom / finance as fiction

Proposals from graduate students are particularly welcome.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to artmoneycrisis@gmail.com by the 31st January 2016 to be considered. More information about the conference can be found at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26186