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Episode 10:

Ethics as Authorship
A Preliminary Study of Institutional Power Structures

18 Dec 2018
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, DE

In 2018 we assume ethical conduct in the arts should come as naturally as breathing. But at closer inspection, our ethical powerhouses seem more like a new breed of stratified value systems than anything else. At this point, a new battle is been waged that goes beyond tastemaking. A struggle over competing notions of agency and autonomy, and of gender, race, subcultural currency, dirty money and other dark spots.

Is the art world ready to derail its elite foundations in favour of genuine autonomy, or some other moral horizon? Or would this exercise, even in the best case, be just another new facade on an old building …

In this workshop, we ask how an institution can maintain a sense of ethics, but also what “Ethical Authorship” might possibly mean, beyond artwashing. It will act as an open table for horizontal discussions and potential future plans as a working group. The event is preceded by KW discussions along comparable premises, with urban sociologist Friederike Landau and with artists Daniela Brahm & Les Schliesser (ExRotaprint).

Language: English

Participants: