Abstract/Summary

This issue of OnCurating aims to shed light on the complex and often-times concealed economic basis of art production and exhibition-making. The contributions cover a range of issues from a highly speculative financial model of the art market, public funding mechanisms, and attempts of building alternative economic systems. The compilation of texts are to be read in the context of two key problems related to arts funding. Firstly, the art market’s speculative value creation favours singular artistic production of reification/objectification, emphasises the funding of singular artists, and reaffirms its own hegemonic structure in the light of an economic system of speculation that commodifies with the help of (public) funding bodies and the arts field at large. Secondly, between the state-based public funding paradigms and their complicity or resistance to the reproduction of unequal relations and perpetuation of (neo-)colonial dichotomies through a centre-periphery model.