Event overview
Abstract of the work: Our understandings of money, possessions, and ownership are all changing dramatically as consumption becomes digital and virtual. The Metaverse is an imagined future space where these building blocks of neoliberal production and consumption are delinked.
In this seminar, Professor Russell W. Belk will talk about one of his current works where he examines these changes through the affordances of cryptocurrencies, algorithmic collectibles, and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). He seeks to disambiguate these efforts at disintermediation through online auctions and speculation. He theorizes new forms of ownership with fractional ownership and fractionalized property rights.
Russ also proposes the concept of psychological possession as a counterpart to psychological ownership and draws on conceptual art as an analogy for what is happening with NFTs and more generally in the consumption of digital goods.
In this research, Russ seeks to understand why some consumers pay astronomical prices for digital art that includes simple and often silly artwork with limited property rights. To do so he distinguishes alternate, but sometimes overlapping, buyer motivations in the world of crypto art as we purportedly move toward the Metaverse.
About the speaker: Russell W. Belk is a Professor of Marketing and Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at the Schulich School of Business, York University. In 2017, he was elected to the Royal Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest honours for researchers. Co-founder of the Association for Consumer Research Film Festival and with over 800 publications, Russ is currently on the editorial boards of more than 20 journals. His research involves the meanings of possessions, collecting, gift-giving, sharing, and materialism, and his research is mostly cultural, visual, qualitative, and interpretive. More details about Russ can be found at https://schulich.yorku.ca/faculty/russell-w-belk/.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Nov 2023 | 1:00pm - 2:00pm |
Accessibility
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