Merlin Carpenter considers how “The Outside Can’t Go Outside” has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation.

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled Kunsthalle Bern’s rooms with transit blankets stretched over identically scaled frames, each named after one of the artist’s seven galleries and marked “not for sale.” This publication documents these “paintings,” how the works thematize the limbo of the “midcareer” artist, as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.

This book presents the work of London-based artist Merlin Carpenter. Focused on a series of exhibitions entitled, “The Opening”—marked by the fact that all the paintings presented were produced at the galleries during the exhibition openings—the book documents all six events via text and snapshot-like images.

Peripheries are profoundly ambiguous regions. While trying to build a relationship with the center, the periphery often finds itself excluded both on a structural and actor-related level, no matter if the center-periphery model is defined in terms of space or along relations of power.

Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market.