A portrait of the artist as a worker
Tuesday 17 of January
You are an artist and that means: you don’t do it for the money. That is what some people think. It is a great excuse not to pay you for all the things you do. So what happens is that you, as an artist, put money into
projects that others will show in their museum, in their Kunsthalle, in their exhibition space, in their gallery. So you are an investor. You give loans nobody will repay you. You take financial risks. You speculate on yourself as an artistic asset. You are a trader. You cannot put all your money into one kind of artistic stocks. So you diversify your activities. You manage the risks you take. You would say it differently. I know. You say you suffer from a gentle schizophrenia. You are multiple personalities. You are a photographer, but also a DJ. You have a magazine, you are a publisher, but you also organize parties.
(Read the whole text in the attached pdf)
Dieter Lesage (b. 1966) is a Belgian philosopher, writer and critic. He studied philosophy at the University of Louvain (Leuven, B) (1984-1988) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (F) (1988-1990). In 1993 he obtained his Ph.D. at the Institute of Philosophy in Louvain. He was a visiting professor at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem De Kooning Academie (Hogeschool Rotterdam, NL) (2003-2005) and full-time visiting professor at the Institut für Kulturtheorie of the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (D) during the summer semester 2007, with a Eurolecture grant from the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung (Hamburg). Dieter Lesage is a professor of philosophy at the Department of Audiovisual and Performing Arts Rits (Erasmushogeschool University College Brussels, B) and a professor of art criticism at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (B), member of the Editorial Board of Afterall. A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry (London-Los Angeles) and member of the International Advisory Board of Art & Research. A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods (Glasgow). Dieter Lesage lives in Berlin.
