What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, ECONOMY: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century frames the increasing attendance to economic relations in contemporary art signalling the end of postmodernism’s hegemony and the privileging of a cultural subject.
Contributions reflect on art in its relation to property, speculation and finance, immaterial labour and the avant-garde, the lessons of the past in pursuing an aesthetics of the economy, the ethics of care, socially engaged practices and the role of the art document, queer politics and class, the new feminist critique of economic subjects, migration, precarity and empowerment, the ambivalence of the commons, as well as the possibility of opposition – in the art world and beyond – to the biopolitical rule of global capital as the arbiter of human relations. Building on, extending and querying the curatorial project ECONOMY(Edinburgh and Glasgow 2013), the book puts forward a proposition that cuts across a number of ‘turns’ in the art of the past two decades, connecting localised approaches with the broader organisation of production and the unprecedented apparentness of the economy in the passage from the 20th to the 21st century.
CONTENTS
Introduction: ‘The Last Instance’ – The Apparent Economy, Social Struggles and Art in Global Capitalism
Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
I Production
1 Art as Property
Andrea Phillips
2 Art and the Problem of Immaterial Labour: Reflections on Its Recent History
John Roberts
3 Indifferent Agent: Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital
Marina Vishmidt
4 Women’s Lives, Labour, Contracts, Documents: The Biopolitical Tactics of Feminist Art, Act Two and a Half
Angela Dimitrakaki
5 Seeing Socialism: On the Aesthetics of the Economy, Production and the Plan
Alberto Toscano
II Subjects
6 DIWY!: Precarity in Embodied Capitalism
Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos
7 Being With, Across, Over and Through: Art’s Caring Subjects, Ethics Debates and Encounters
Kirsten Lloyd
8 The Long Working Hours of Normal Love
Renate Lorenz
9 Occupy the Art World? Notes on a Potential Artistic Subject
Gregory Sholette
10 (Re)Making the World: An Interview with Melanie Gilligan on
Capitalist Exchange, Subject Formation and ‘Social Synthesis’
Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
11 Economy, Capital and the Commons
Massimo De Angelis