Social Securities Talk: Money is No Object: Aesthetics, Abstraction, and the Politics of Care

In his talk, Scott Ferguson will rethink the historical relationship between money and aesthetics in an effort to broaden the politics of care using the alternative conception of money articulated by the contemporary heterodox school of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Mobilizing MMT, Ferguson critiques exhausted dialectical oppositions between money and art and contends that monetary abstraction, rather than representing a private, finite, and alienating technology, is instead a public and fundamentally unlimited medium that harbors still unrealized powers for inclusion and cultivation. A reception will follow.

Scott Ferguson is Associate Professor of Film and New Media Studies in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics & the Politics of Care (2018) and Co-Director of The Modern Money Network Humanities Division, co-host of the Money on the Left podcast, and Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Social Securities series and the Idee Levitan Endowment