Asset pricing vs Empirical asset pricing I get confused on what is the difference between asset pricing vs empirical asset pricing? Could you clarify your answer? Also, is asset pricing just assessing the current value of an asset?

Thanks,
As mentioned in Herr K's comment, asset pricing is the theory to price assets (such as equity, bonds, options, futures, swaps, etc). For this, you can use models like CAPM/Fama-French (returns), Black-Scholes (options), Swensonn (interest rates), and many many others. When you say empirical asset pricing, this means that you go to the data (and each model deals with a different type of data) and try to price an existing asset based on the information that you see on the market. 

For example, in the Black-Scholes model, given the current stock price (S), the strike price for the option (K), the time until exercise (T-t), the risk-free rate (r) and the volatility of returns (sigma), you can use the formula directly and calculate the price of the option. Notice that this would be a theoretical price. In practice, you might observe something else in the market. You may want to do some arbitrage from here since there is mispricing (Don't go using this in the real market, but you get my point).

For your last question, asset pricing is not necessarily just about the current value of an asset. You probably would also want to estimate future values based on your models. In fact, it is really of no use a model that tells you today's price. For that, you just look at the price on the tape and ignore your model. The whole point of building models is to make predictions.