Conversations: Dave Beech and Esther Leslie

Dave Beech is an artist and writer who was a member of the Freee Art Collective. His works have been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennale and Liverpool Biennale and his books include Art and Value (Brill, 2015) and Beauty (MIT Whitechapel 2007). He researches the formative social conditions for artistic practice and its relations to broader social and political forces. His book Art and Value relocates the economics of art within the discursive history of ‘economic exceptionalism’ and his book, Art and Labour, reconsiders art as a form of labour that arose during the crisis of the regime of the arts and the installation of the capitalist regime of labour. His artworks consist of sequences of montages with texts that reflect critically on the history of documentary film and photography.