Peripheries are profoundly ambiguous regions. While trying to build a relationship with the center, the periphery often finds itself excluded both on a structural and actor-related level, no matter if the center-periphery model is defined in terms of space or along relations of power.

With its 100 questions and answers from major practitioners of the art world and beyond, this book helps to examine the various parameters for a new institutional model.

Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and postmodern thought, renowned German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen compares the abstract and climbing values of artworks with the plunging value of music—a traditionally immaterial art—in order to formulate a broad reflection on the current “crisis of value in the arts.”

Merlin Carpenter considers how “The Outside Can’t Go Outside” has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation.

The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out.