About this lecture
Ricardo Mbarkho rereads art history through one foundational question: where is there an artwork? Rather than defining art or rehearsing stylistic chronology, the lecture examines the regimes that authorize something as an artwork. At stake is a conflict between economic value, which fixes the artwork as commodity and asset, and symbolic value, which understands the artwork as meaning, position, and interruption within the visible order. From modernity to artificial intelligence, the trajectory becomes a series of displacements: painting as a contract of perception; installation as spatial politics; society as operational field; the body as exposed inscription; conceptual practices as idea’s framing; video as temporal construction; digital interactivity as protocol; blockchain and NFTs as programmable ownership; AI as redistribution of authorship across datasets and infrastructures. The issue is structural: who configures the tool, who defines its norm, who benefits when it becomes inevitable, and how can the artwork remain critically open within that pressure?