Interdisciplinarity, art and immaterial labour in the creative economy: Maurizio Lazzarato and the production of value in ArtScience practice

Abstract

Sociological deployments of Radical Italian theory have offered insight into the changing role of art in light of the generalised valorisation of creativity in post-Fordist societies. Less has been said about the increasingly useful character of art, as exemplified by artistic engagement with interdisciplinary forms of problem solving. This article focuses on the field of practice commonly known as ArtScience. I argue that Lazzarato's theory gains new relevance in this novel field of cultural practice, where material production is an increasingly minor element of artistic labour. I draw on two case studies from artists practising ArtScience in Berlin as speculative provocations for thinking about the ways in which social life today becomes implicated in the production of value, via processes of subjectivation, collaboration and communication.