Dr Dave Beech
Title
Reader
College
University of the Arts London
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research

Biography
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.Research Outputs
Art/Design item
- Beech D, Jordan M, Hewitt A, Griffiths S. Citizen Ship (2017)
- Beech D, Jordan M, Hewitt A. Protest is Beautiful (all around the world) (2013)
- Beech D, Jordan M, Hewitt A. Every Shop Window is a Soap Box (2010)
- Beech D, Jordan M, Hewitt A. Protest Drives History (2010)
- Beech D, Jordan M, Hewitt A. The New Futurist Manifesto, (Revised, Expanded and Updated) (2009)
- Beech D, Hewitt A, Jordan M. How to Talk to Public Art (2006)
- Beech D, Hewitt A, Jordan M. The Aesthetic Function of Public Art is to Codify Social Distinctions as Natural Ones (2005)
Article
- Beech D. Art and the Politics of Eliminating Handicraft (2019)
- Beech D. Recovering radicalism: Dave Beech on critical art after postmodernism (2009)
- Beech D. Autonomy Or Barbarism (2007)
- Beech D. The Politics of Beauty (2007)
- Beech D. Shock v. Awe (2006)
- Beech D. Forget Elitism (2006)
- Beech D. Institutionalization For All (2005)
- Beech D. The Art of Skill (2005)
- Beech D. The Debunkers of Art (2005)
Book
- Beech D. Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art (2020)
- Beech D. Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production (2019)
- Wilson S, Quinn M, Beech D, Tulloch C, Lehnert M. The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu (2018)
- Beech D. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (2015)
- Beech D, Roberts J. The Philistine Controversy (2002)
Book Section
- Beech D. Modes of Assembly: Art, the People and the State (2017)
- Beech D. Weberian Lessons: Art, Pedagogy and Managerialism (2010)
- Beech D. Introduction: art and the politics of beauty (2009)
- Beech D. Turning the whole thing around: text art today (2009)
Conference, Symposium or Workshop item
- Beech D. The Scale of Contemporary Art (2017)
- Beech D. Protesting the Museum (2016)
Teaching
Current research students
- Andy Conio, Multiple Subjects in Deleuzean Video Art. (Lead supervisor)
- Alice Evans, Epistolary Film. (Lead supervisor)
- Andrew Hewitt, The Politics of Art in Culture Led Regeneration. (Lead supervisor)
- Amanda Johansson, Costume in Institutional Critique. (Lead supervisor)
- Lana Locke, Feral Objects (Lead supervisor)
- Janice Dorothy Mitchell, Inside/Outside and Beyond: Framing Critical Practice as Institutional Critique and Critical Theory (Joint supervisor)
- Amanda Newall, Costume and Institutional Critique. (Lead supervisor)
- Eva Weinmayr, Publishing as Event (based at Valand Academy). (Lead supervisor)
- Joshua Y'Barbo, SChelsea Salon: Institutional Critique of the Art School Through Interstitial Pedagogy. (Lead supervisor)
- Joshua Y’Barbo, Chelsea Salon: Institutional Critique of the Art School Through Interstitial Pedagogy. (Lead supervisor)
Past research students
- Alice Evans, After Brecht: Is it possible to make a contemporary Brechtian artwork? (Lead supervisor)