Anthea Callen will give the opening keynote address at the ACUADS Conference. Below is the abstract for her presentation, and a bio.
Worth and Power: the cultural politics of ‘value’.
What does ‘value’ actually mean? Aiming to provide a framework for debate in this ACUADS Conference about the wider issues and implications of positive creative ‘value’, I want to consider what value means, and how ideas of ‘value’ may have changed in the last 50 years. To consider the extent to which our notions of value reflect – and indeed construct – the dominant normative social models of worth. I shall look at how and to whom, or what, ‘value’ accrues, and the ways this might play out in social difference. How does worth, or value, relate to power?
Bio:
Anthea Callen FRSA is Professor Emeritus of the ANU, and Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, University of Nottingham, UK. She is an author, lecturer, art expert and painter. Her expertise in art history, visual culture and the gender politics of visual representation spans the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, notably in France and Britain, though she specialises in Impressionism and nineteenth-century artists’ materials and techniques. As a painter, she has a strong personal as well as professional interest in twentieth-century modernism and contemporary art, especially feminist/women’s art practice. Her latest book The Work of Art: Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-century France was published in 2015, and her forthcoming volume Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body will be published in June 2018. Callen has been awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship 2016-2018 to research a new book on Impressionist Painting Techniques. http://www.antheacallen.co.uk/