Narration: Points of View
Love, capitalism, art – Madame Bovary today

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the journal „View” invites you to the second meeting in the series „Points of view”.

During the seminar, Łukasz Zaremba will talk to Mieke Bal about her current film project, emotions and capitalism, and about how to use art in theoretical inquiry. “We have an idea of passion and intimacy. We try to fulfill them, but we can’t. Why? This why is the gap between desires and social structure. The social simultaneously shapes these desires and prevents you from achieving them,” says Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, the author of "Why Love Hurts?". This is how she describes her point of departure in the analysis of contemporary ideas about love, the embroilment of love in capitalist economy, and the ways in which capitalism shapes our desires and visions of ourselves.

The Dutch scholar, theoretician, artist and curator Mieke Bal found her point of departure for the inquiry into the relations of romantic love and capitalism in the character of Madame Bovary. Transported into contemporary times, the character allegorizes the inevitable connections between love and capitalism in its various historical forms—the motives of unfulfillment, contradiction of desires, economization of love.

The point of departure for Friday’s conversation will in turn be Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s latest film project—Madame B (the premiere of the project will take place at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in December 2013). The participants of the discussion will also talk about the role of artistic installation and the place of the viewer, as well as Bal’s use of the concept of the “theoretical object”—a concept crucial in understanding the way works of art can be used in creating (and not only writing) theory.