Art as Diagnostic Instrument

This series looks at how art and its institutions reveal the economic, social, and symbolic mechanisms through which value, legitimacy, and meaning are produced.

Essay No.1— Capitalizing Cultural Capital: examines how museum exhibitions organized by luxury brands convert cultural authority into economic capital, using Cartier’s institutional collaborations as a case study.

Essay No.2— Culture and Commerce: deals with how art circulates within contemporary economic and institutional systems, asking whether the separation between culture and commerce was ever historically pure.

Essay No.3 — Forthcoming

Reading the Invisible

This series examines how meaning and value are inferred through signs, language, images, and other forms of creative expression, and how mind and intelligence are attributed through acts of interpretation. Rather than adjudicating the aesthetic value of AI-generated art against work made by humans using more traditional mediums, we take the emergence of artificial intelligence as a lens for examining what our reactions to it reveal about ourselves — about how we think and act. Visual art is an apt subject precisely because it leans so heavily on subjective views.

Essay No.1— The Spectator’s Error: asks why we judge AI-generated art through criteria we have already abandoned elsewhere, showing how the evaluative frameworks applied to the new medium reveal more about the observer than the work itself. Through conceptual art, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, the essay reveals that intention and inner experience are structurally unavailable to external verification in any subject.

Essay No.2 — The Tacit Made Legible: looks at how our reactions to AI-generated art expose the tacit assumptions behind judgment. Through semiotics, the essay examines how we infer meaning from signs and assign value by assuming an index of origin. As a prelude to a theory we visit in greater detail in the next series, This essay turns to Malafouris’s Material Engagement Theory where making is distributed across body, tool, and material to reveal that authorship has never been self-contained.

Essay No.3 — Forthcoming

Mind in Matter

In this series, we examine how engagement with the physical world shapes the mind through embodied perception, material enactment, and image-thinking — Mieke Bal’s framework in which images are a mode of thought participate actively in creativity. The essays consider how the body gives form to experience, and how objects, images, and materials take part in the making of meaning. Together they explore how cognition and creativity emerge through embodied and material engagement, where mind and matter are inseparable.

Essay No.1 — Forthcoming