Art and Capitalism by Child, Danielle;

Short description:

A central tenet of capitalism is the production of commodities to create profit (money); as such, the logical starting place for this companion is the relationship of art to these foundational elements of capitalism.

Long description:

A central tenet of capitalism is the production of commodities to create profit (money); as such, the logical starting place for this collection is the relationship of art to these foundational elements of capitalism. However, as the contributions to the volume reveal, capitalism encompasses more than just an economic system in which art is bought and sold alongside other goods.

This volume approaches the subject of art and capitalism thematically through five distinct parts: Art Markets, Money and Myths; Work, Labour and the Artist; Capitalist Technologies; Spaces of Art and Capital: Institutions and Beyond; and Crisis, Contestation and Critique. This thematic approach avoids presenting a definitive linear historical narrative of art and capitalism, allowing for an expanded and diverse approach to scholarship that addresses the relationship between the two since the advent of modernity. The volume presents multiple perspectives on capitalism in conversation with one another, including race, gender, class and global/geographical inequality.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, fine art, museum studies, curatorial studies, politics and visual culture.

Table of Contents:

Introduction Part One: Art Markets, Money and Myths 1. Art and Craft  2. Antwerp As the Early Capital of Capitalism  3. The Green Side of the Landscape  4. Taxing the Art Resale Market: A Proposal for Regulating the Field  5.What Keeps Capitalism Alive? On Intellectual Paradigms, Art, and Hegemony  Part Two: Work, Labour and the Artist  6. The Contingent Art Worker  7. Race and inequality in the contemporary craft economy  8. Assembling Economies: The collaborative work of Barbara Steveni 1960s-1990s  9. The Artist without Work: Li Liao and the Critique of the Capitalist Work Ethic  10. Beyond the Guest List: Dark Matter and Class Relations in Contemporary Art   Part Three: Capitalist Technologies  11. ‘Call Me a Thinker-Tinker:’ On Racial Capitalism, Technology, and Black Arts in the United States  12. Forensic Oceanography’s Composite Images, ‘Counter-Forensics’ and Militant Research  13. AI, artists and residencies. Capitalism and criticality  14. Technospheric Speculations: Materiality, Textuality and Impropriety  Part Four: Spaces of Art and Capital: Institutions and Beyond  15. Curating distinction? The ambivalent role of private art museums as instruments of elite reproduction  16.  Giardini as Commons  17.  Misavowal: documenta fifteen and the Rhetoric of Power in Global Culture  18.  What’s (in) a case? Museum, Care, and Capital  19.  From Acquisition Agreements to Certificates of Usership: How Theory Becomes Practice and Transforms Museum Collection Strategies  Part Five: Crisis, Contestation and Critique  20.  Which side are you on? 1 Ultra-red, Unión de Vecinos and (Anti-)Capitalist Life  21. J14 – Contemporary Israeli Art and Capitalist Critique  22. From Resistance to Worlds Otherwise: Art against Extractivism  23.  Unlearning colonial silences and undoing colonial capitalism: Truth-telling through creative practice on Yamaji Country  24.  If chicken could talk: Collaborative economic learning and organising connected to rural and more-than-capitalist concepts and lived experience across the Rural School of Economics