CartArt & Theory Industrial Complex:
Capital, institutions, language and the production of value Instructor: Jack SegbarsProgram: Art and Curatorial PracticeDate: June 11, 18Time: 09:00AM – 12:00PM ET
DESCRIPTION: This Roundtable begins from a critical stance toward the tightening co-dependence between art and theory within the institutional and economic structures of contemporary cultural production. Rather than affirming this relationship as an inevitable or progressive development, it interrogates the mechanisms through which theory and art have become mutually instrumentalized within shared circuits of validation, value, and visibility. The Roundtable reframes their interaction as a material and political problem: how are artistic and theoretical practices shaped, limited, and co-authored by the forces of governance, policy, and institutional mediation that transform creative labor into exchangeable forms of knowledge and capital? By analyzing the shared material base of art and theory, the discussion exposes how disciplinary divisions reproduce themselves within capitalism’s cultural logic, even when presented as critique. From this perspective, political economy appears not as context but as an active author in the production of meaning and form. Across two sessions, participants will explore how the art–theory nexus can be rethought as a site of tension rather than collaboration, identifying strategies for resisting or reconfiguring the conditions that capture creative and philosophical production within the industrial complex of contemporary art.
SESSION ONE: The first session introduces the theoretical framework for the Roundtable through key texts by Marina Vishmidt, Peter Osborne, and Andrea Fraser, examining how their analyses of labor, value, and authorship reveal the interdependence of economic and aesthetic forms. The discussion then extends to Robert Brandom and Reza Negarestani, whose concept of a “space of possibilities” opens new grounds for understanding the relation between art and reason. We will also consider Josefine Wikström’s critique of art’s confinement to the experiential domain, placing it in dialogue with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a historical anchor for art’s entanglement with reason. In the background, readings by Alberto Toscano and Sianne Ngai on real abstraction help reframe how social relations determine the production and perception of art. After the instructor’s presentation, participants will deliver ten-minute interventions connecting the readings to their own artistic or theoretical projects, identifying and unpacking specific instances of the art–theory relation through conceptual or material analysis.
SESSION TWO: The second session builds on the insights from Session One. Participants will present short reflections on how the readings and discussions have informed their work. The conversation will focus on how theoretical and artistic practices can resist their capture by capitalist institutions and generate new modes of production, circulation, and collaboration that exceed the current art–theory industrial complex.
IMAGE: Jean-François Marmion, Gilles Deleuze at home in Paris, 1988.
Jack Segbars is an artist and writer whose work investigates the institutional and discursive conditions that frame art’s emergence. His practice examines how production, language, curation, and governance intersect in shaping artistic meaning and value. Within his visual and textual work, Segbars mobilizes the interconnections between critic, curator, writer, and artist as a mode of inquiry. He has published widely in Metropolis M, PARSE, and Open! and is the author of All Around the Periphery (Onomatopee, 2009) and Inertia (Onomatopee, 2012). His recent research includes Benjamin in Palestine (Ramallah, 2015) and The Saas Fee Summer School for Art (Switzerland), both examined within his PhD project, followed by an exhibition at Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam, 2016). A publication based on this research will appear in 2026. Segbars is a co-founder and board member of Platform Beeldende Kunst (Platform Visual Arts) and has lectured at several postgraduate programs in the Netherlands, including the Design Academy Eindhoven and the Master Artistic Research in The Hague. His current work investigates the development of independent art institutions, their relation to politics and governance, and the processes of institutionalization that shape the art field today.
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