Peter Sellars + Raj Patel

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” –Oscar Wilde
Was Oscar Wilde onto something? Can owning nothing lead to spirituality? Raj Patel, an award-winning academic and the author of The Value of Nothing, sits down with celebrated theater director Peter Sellars to dissect the economics of nothing.

Noted for his unique contemporary staging of classical and contemporary operas and plays, Peter Sellars is an American theater director who has gained international recognition for his work and who also teaches at UCLA. The director will make his directorial debut at the Metropolitan Opera in February 2010 staging John Adams’s groundbreaking first opera, Nixon in China.
Raj Patel is a writer, academic, and activist. He has degrees from Oxford University, the London School of Economics, and Cornell University, and is both a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and the New York Times and international bestseller The Value of Nothing. He has also published widely in the academic press, with articles in peer-reviewed philosophy, politics, sociology and economics journals.