Aesthetics are increasingly linked to the promise of an effect and the demand of a measurable impact. The performing arts have to position themselves in the economic sphere. This is not only about financial resources and countable profits; monetary value is moreover inseparably connected to immaterial goods like affect, care or responsibility. The engagement invested in aesthetic / artistic labour can be thus conceived as creative, innovative or perhaps even as considerably profit-seeking and in this sense as an ‘enrichment’. The value attached to aesthetic objects assumes many forms: How can aesthetic labour which seeks to create a surplus, be compensated? What does this labour produce, who profits from it and at the expense of whom? Are critical ambitions of the contemporary arts compatible with the dominant material structures – and if yes, in what manner? The third annual conference of the ERC-Project ‘The Aesthetics of Applied Theatre’ aims to explore the eco-nomic aspects of the arts, that cannot be reduced to strategies of commercialization, nor to the monetary reward of artistic work. In general, it is about the ambivalence of ‘give-and-take’ in the realm of the aesthetics.

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