Asbjørn Grønstad on JUDGE ME and Post Capitalistic Auction

Asbjørn Grønstad on JUDGE ME and Post Capitalistic Auction: Art, Value, and Justice in the Age of Neoliberalism

In the chapter "Art and Justice in the Age of Neoliberalism" from Free Speech and Neoliberalism, Asbjørn Grønstad situates Jingyi Wang's JUDGE ME and Post Capitalistic Auction within a broader inquiry into neoliberalism, artistic labour, value, justice, and the public procedures through which societies decide what counts.

The chapter begins by examining how neoliberal rationality has entered the field of art. Art has not remained outside the structures of entrepreneurialism, marketisation, institutional branding, and precarious labour. Artists are increasingly asked to operate as self-managing subjects, project-makers, cultural entrepreneurs, and flexible producers. The art field still carries the language of creativity, imagination, and critique, while also absorbing the values of innovation, adaptability, self-promotion, and market legibility.

For Grønstad, this condition makes artistic labour especially revealing. Neoliberal culture has appropriated many of the qualities once associated with art: creativity, flexibility, constant reinvention, and the capacity to work outside fixed structures. These qualities are now demanded of workers far beyond the art world. In this sense, art is both absorbed by neoliberalism and uniquely positioned to expose its logic. It becomes a site where the contradictions of value, labour, freedom, and self-commodification can be observed with particular intensity.

The chapter then turns to the relation between art and justice. Grønstad develops this inquiry through the intersections of visual culture, law, ethics, and institutional form. Courtrooms, legal procedures, evidence, testimony, judgment, and verdict are not only legal instruments. They are also spatial, aesthetic, and performative structures. They shape how authority appears, how claims become visible, and how judgment is produced as a public act.

This is where JUDGE ME becomes central to the chapter. Grønstad discusses the work as a performance staged in Saint Jakob's Church in Bergen during Meteor Festival in 2021. Structured as a court trial, JUDGE ME places Jingyi Wang in two opposed roles: the performing artist as claimant and the marketing professional or entrepreneur as defendant. The court is asked to consider whether artists and their work are adequately valued in society today.

The significance of the work lies in the way it transforms value into a visible public procedure. JUDGE ME gathers the elements of a trial: judge, jury, witnesses, expert witnesses, claimant, defendant, statements, evidence, argument, and verdict. Through this structure, the work concentrates forms of judgment that usually remain dispersed across the market, institutions, media visibility, public opinion, and the artist's own internal self-assessment.

In Grønstad's reading, JUDGE ME resonates with Wendy Brown's account of neoliberalism as a rationality that extends economic metrics, competition, and capital value into every dimension of human life. Wang's claimant argues that the value of artists fails to be adequately validated within the current value system of society. The problem is not only financial insecurity. It is the broader economisation of value itself: the demand that artistic labour justify itself through usefulness, legibility, marketability, public benefit, or measurable contribution.

The defendant in the performance voices a series of common misconceptions about contemporary art. Contemporary art is described as difficult, abstract, poorly skilled, self-important, detached from ordinary audiences, or socially useless. These statements are crude, but their force lies in their familiarity. They reproduce a public language in which art must be judged by consumer expectation, market demand, communicability, utility, and social duty. The performance exposes how easily value collapses into usefulness when artistic labour is placed before a public tribunal.

The witness structure expands this conflict. Witnesses and experts address the difficulty of art language, the role of institutions and specialists, the influence of visibility and social media, the scale of the art market, public funding, and the idea of artistic labour as a positive externality. These voices do not resolve the problem. They make the structure of disagreement audible. The work becomes a space where social assumptions about art are spoken, tested, challenged, and placed under judgment.

Grønstad pays particular attention to the legal frame. The courtroom in JUDGE ME is not a decorative metaphor. It produces a condition in which value must pass through procedure. The transformation of a church into a temporary court brings together the sacred and the profane, the aesthetic and the juridical, the social and the institutional. Value is no longer an abstract theme. It becomes an event of public adjudication.

The chapter also discusses Post Capitalistic Auction in relation to JUDGE ME. Grønstad treats the two projects as thematically connected works that both address the question of non-monetary values under neoliberal culture. They operate through different institutional frameworks. JUDGE ME uses the courtroom. Post Capitalistic Auction uses the auction. In PCA, artworks are not approached through money alone, but also through understanding, opportunity, and exchange.

This connection is important for NVI. Grønstad's reading shows that JUDGE ME and Post Capitalistic Auction are not isolated projects. They form part of a larger inquiry into how value is produced, recognised, judged, exchanged, and legitimised. JUDGE ME addresses value through judgment. Post Capitalistic Auction addresses value through exchange and allocation. Both works reveal that value is never simply given. It requires forms, procedures, institutions, and publics through which it can appear.

In this sense, JUDGE ME makes visible the adjudication of value, while Post Capitalistic Auction makes visible the exchange and selection of value. One asks what happens when artistic value is placed before a court. The other asks what happens when artistic value is placed inside an auction whose currencies exceed money. Together, they show how art can create social situations in which the rules of value become perceptible.

Grønstad's wider argument is that artists working today face a difficult condition. They must operate inside systems that increasingly convert phenomena and values into economic language, while also seeking ways to resist that conversion. Art cannot rely on a pure outside position, since it is already entangled with markets, institutions, visibility, labour precarity, and self-branding. Its critical force comes from working within these contradictions and making their structures visible.

The chapter's postscript expands this reflection through a broader meditation on art, scarcity, censorship, and survival. Grønstad considers what a world without cultural works would look like, and why the value of artistic expression becomes sharper in conditions of crisis. In references to dystopian and post-apocalyptic imaginaries, the chapter suggests that art is not a decorative surplus. It carries the capacity to imagine alternatives to the status quo.

This reflection casts JUDGE ME and Post Capitalistic Auction in a larger light. Their force does not come from delivering slogans about neoliberalism. It comes from constructing specific social forms: a trial, an auction, a jury, witnesses, bidders, advisors, experts, artists, and publics. Through these forms, abstract questions of value become embodied, procedural, and collective experiences.

For NVI, Grønstad's chapter provides an important external scholarly anchor. It confirms that Jingyi Wang's works can be read not only as performance, live art, or participatory art, but as practice-based research into value, justice, legitimacy, and public judgment under neoliberal conditions.

JUDGE ME shows how value enters judgment. Post Capitalistic Auction shows how value enters exchange. Together, they show how art can create public structures through which value systems are exposed, tested, and reimagined.

From the perspective of New Value Institute, this external reading supports a central proposition: artistic practice can operate as value architecture. It can organise situations in which the hidden mechanisms of value become visible and discussable. It can transform value from an abstract theme into a public procedure. It can create the conditions under which societies may begin to ask, again, what should count, who gets to judge, and by what forms value becomes legitimate.