Categories: Political Economy, Intellectual Property Law
Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty tackles “legacy” issues of intellectual property rights (IPR) in artistic scholarship and proposes a category or class of works that has no relation to IPR or to proprietary regimes of copyright and academic privilege. Effectively a structuralist argument for establishing new forms of artistic scholarship that operate in direct opposition to established norms in both the art world and neoliberal academia, the thematics and scenarios of Works for Works, Book 1 are nonetheless rigorously referenced against past and present-day arguments for and against patrimonial and paternalistic, avant-garde and normative, forms of censure and conformity across cultural production.
Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty notably privileges an iterative, generative, and aleatory methodology for artistic scholarship, with transmedia as “tutelary form” of editioning works against the dictates of the art-academic complex. This focus on generativity also invokes the dialectical operations historically associated with past avant-gardes as they have negotiated an elective nihilism as path for exiting established and authorized forms of conceptual and intellectual inquiry in the Arts and Humanities.
Gavin Keeney is Director of Agence ‘X’, founded in New York, New York, in 2007. He completed a research doctorate in Architecture at Deakin University, Australia, in 2014, on the subject of “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture.” His publications include Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 1: Radical Scholarship (punctum, 2015), and Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime (punctum, 2017). He has taught and lectured in architecture schools in the US, England, Slovenia, Australia, and India.
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