This lecture will look at the financial logic of abstract risk as the central contemporary form of the valorisation of capital in an increasingly virtual and automated milieu, and how abstract risk likewise emerges as the principle of the ‘automatic subject’ of art as the node of valorisation on this digitalised plane. In both instances, there is a subsumption of labour to value, and the confusion between being a commodity and having a commodity. The question then would be what antagonisms keep recurring in this schema, and how they may be extended.

Marina Vishmidt (born 1976) is a writer, editor, and critic occupied mainly with questions around art, labor and value. In 2013 she completed a PhD at Queen Mary University London, London, titled Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital. She has authored chapters in The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics and in The ECONOMY Reader (both forthcoming), and her work on debt, social reproduction, and artistic entrepreneurialism can be found on e-flux journal and libcom.org. She has also written for Afterall, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope, Mute, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, among other international periodicals, collections and catalogues.