Corporate urban furniture, public space, and money. A sketch for an artistic research project
The basic idea of the project is a Marx-inspired analysis of the economic logic of corporate urban furniture with a focus on exploring it's spatial patterns. It's not about a rigid application of the Marxian technical apparatus, but, as a start, about embracing his critical perspective on economic patterns. The first step in Marx' critique of political economy was a sorrow historical analysis of how economic surplus is generated: in order to be able to critique economic inequality one has first to understand the regime of capital accumulation that produces the inequality. The first volume of his Das Kapital is a minute analysis of contemporary modes of the generation of economic surplus with a particular focus on Great Britain and the so-called Manchester-capitalism, as well as of then current theories of economic surplus such as e.g. Riccardo's and Smith'. Only after this empirico-historical analysis Marx sets out for his own theoretical description of capitalist accumulation and economic surplus in the subsequent volumes of the Capital, posthumously published (and edited) by Friedrich Engels.
