Terry Smith: Iconomic Wars

March 9, 2022

Terry Smith, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Theory at the European Graduate School, will present Iconomic Wars.

In a famous essay, Walter Benjamin remarked that art’s history might be seen as a “working out” of an internal tension between “the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value.” In 1935, film was the art form triggering this tension. Today, the question of value is all the more potent in every way, culturally, economically, politically, spiritually. In our multi-mediated image economy and with tensions of all kinds in society rising exponentially, the question of the iconomy is crucial. What does this mean for artists, curators, and all of us in making sense of the world and what is to be done?