The Liquidity Trap: Public Talk by Ana Teixeira Pinto

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer based in Berlin. She is currently a lecturer at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and contributes regularly to publications such as e-flux Journal, Art-Agenda, Mousse, Frieze/de, Domus, Inaesthetics, The Manifesta Journal, and Text zur Kunst.



Since 2008, new capital was massively created to prevent the devaluation of existing capital, but this excess liquidity did not find its way back into the production cycle. On the contrary, it was swiftly locked away into idle assets ––such as luxury goods, art or real estate. This surplus liquidity, roaming around in the markets impacts artistic production: to paraphrase Reinier de Graaf, once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for artworks but to operate according to the logic of capital. In the diffuse world of post-Fordist economies, culture gets divorced from the social, appearing instead as a techno-economic biosphere ––a negative totality whose fundamental metaphor is liquidity.