On October 15, 2013, the fifth seminar of DOOSAN Curator Workshop III featured a presentation by Professor Dongjin Seo, who has advanced a sharp viewpoint that adopts a sociological approach to art criticism. The Workshop participants had the opportunity to explore answers to their questions on labor, economics, and social relationships in connection with organizing the upcoming DOOSAN Curator Workshop exhibition.
 
1) Understanding the Artist’s Labor
When artists gather, they typically discuss art funding, working expenses, and their livelihoods. The Workshop participants asked Professor Seo how to view and interpret these circumstances. He noted that it is not so much an issue of money as related to labor, but rather one that is more associated with one’s identity as a capital-laborer. He continued that if there were to be a model of labor and the subject of laborization in the center of the changes occurring over the last 20-30 years, it would be that of the artist. When talking about working like an artist and laboring like an artist, we call it an aesthetic, or aestheticization, of labor. In this case, the meaning of labor is that of artists carrying out their own projects; in other words, since it is work for the purpose of self-realization, it is unrelated to the issue of making a living or subsisting. It is closer to a reward for one’s own talent, or requesting a kind of reward for self-realization. In this regard, he discussed how this is not about wage-labor, which is the representative case of labor, but a world of non-labor?that is, a case of a social good deed. Further, he examined the societal mainstreaming of the world of non-labor; here, the representative example is a professional baseball player’s annual income. The athlete’s annual income in this context is unusual in that it does not represent a reward for the athlete’s work; rather, it reflects a consideration of the athlete’s talent and the degree of the athlete’s contribution to the team’s record. Today, these models of annual salary have entered into the mainstream, and have become the method of rewarding all labor. This is applicable to the case of artists?the reason why famous artists’ artworks are sold at high prices is not because the artists exert a great amount of labor in making the artworks, but because many people want to buy these artworks and show off the respective artist’s superior talent. Professor Seo suggested that these days, the problem is that all people work as if they were artists?in the sense of having to possess something special and having to present their talents in order to be paid?and thus a sense of confusion is emerging due to the changing labor model.
 
2) Identity of the Artist and Labor
Professor Seo pointed out that the reason for the overflowing luxury goods industry is the faltering identity of labor. Since the annual salary that he discussed above is not related to work, but is rather a reward for brilliant talent and capacity, if someone wants to receive a higher level of compensation, then a commensurate level of qualifications is required. He observed that this hierarchy has been applied in the art world via the creation of the star system; the best example of this is the artist audition system that has become firmly established of late in Korea. If this is the case, then what about a system for the social production of art, that is, so-called public art or community art? Meanwhile, Professor Seo voiced his concerns about the changes in art education due to the transition to 1990s neoliberalism. He pointed out that the current educational system, which focuses mainly on graduate exhibitions and portfolios in order to produce catalogues of works to sell in the art market, should be abolished.
 
3) Personal Experiences and Social Relationships
Professor Seo also made reference to a point that one must consider when dealing with labor as a subject in art practice. Artists sometimes flatter themselves as being critical at the moment they are discussing “labor” or “survival,” but in fact it is merely a reference to our generation’s dominant paradigm with regard to art, labor, and economics. In the midst of the changes in the world of labor, it would appear to be ideal if labor were linked to artistic practice, but these behaviors could potentially play reactionary roles that strengthen the dominant images and concepts of labor that surround us. Therefore, he stated that we should challenge those artists by pointing out to them that what they are doing is not engaging in criticism; rather, it is nothing but ideology.
 
Finally, the Workshop participants were interested in hearing Professor Seo’s perspective on the trend of numerous artists creating works that begin with an individual experience and proceed toward social relationships. Professor Seo said that it would be difficult for artists who deal with social relationships based on personal experience to understand the lives of laborers, as the lives of laborers are abstract, rather than things that exist in the midst of their personal regrets, experiences, and reminiscences. In this sense, there is a certain social world that cannot be discussed by means of one’s personal sense, experience, and memory. Thus, the belief that personal experience can directly communicate with society is a point of weakness among recent artworks dealing with social relationships. The forms of artworks that often appear within social relationships are those of banquets, parties, social gatherings, and the like. At this moment, a society that imagines a world of individuals sharing social sentiments cannot bond together as a larger group, but can only remain as units made up of several individuals. In this sense, he expressed concern about artworks that are located along the lineage of “relational aesthetics” proceeding from the 1990s up to the present.