Art And Labour

This book provides a new history of the changing relationship between art, craft and industry focusing and a new political theory of the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, nonalienated labour and unwaged labour.

By exposing the separation of art and labour, Art Work provides a valuable, historical perspective on the present-day struggle for artists' rights.

Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's economics. Key debates in classical, neoclassical and Marxist theories of art are subjected to an exacting critique. The book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.

Working Aesthetics is about the relationship between art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic, but is heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks. As work and life become obscured within the contemporary period, this book asks how artistic practice is affected, including those who labour for artists. Through a series of case studies, Working Aesthetics critically examines the moments in which labour and art intersect under capitalism. When did labour disappear from art production, or accounts of art history? Can we consider the dematerialization of art in the 1960s in relation to the deskilling of work? And how has neoliberal management theory adopting the artist as model worker affected artistic practices in the 21st century? With the narrowing of work and art visible in galleries and art discourse today, Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art, and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today.

Permanent Recession: a Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance' is an enquiry into the capitals and currencies of experimental, radical and artist-run initiatives in Australia.00Excavating a shared history of independent practice stretching back to the 1980s, this publication situates new research within a rich continuum of debate about the Australian artmaking context.00Part research, part advocacy document, part literature review, part reader, part position paper, Permanent Recession is a living contribution to current thought. As a handbook, it is a compilation of useful information in a compact and handy form. It should be used!

Let's be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. Furthermore, when the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are considered as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art then become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more compelling? e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Contributors Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Diedrich Diederichsen, Antke Engel, Liam Gillick, Tom Holert, Lars Bang Larsen, Marion von Osten, Precarious Workers Brigade, Irit Rogoff, and Hito Steyerl

For artists of the increasingly mechanized Victorian age, questions about the meaning and value of labour presented a series of urgent problems: Is work a moral obligation or a religious duty? Must labour be the preserve of men alone? Does the amount of work bestowed on a painting affect its value? Should art celebrate wholesome rural work or reveal the degradations of the industrial workplace? In this highly original book, Tim Barringer considers how artists and theorists addressed these questions and what their solutions reveal about Victorian society and culture. Based on extensive new research, Men at Work offers a compelling study of the image as a means of exploring the relationship between labour and art in Victorian Britain. Barringer arrives at a major reinterpretation of the art and culture of nineteenth-century Britain and its empire as well as new readings of such key figures as Ford Madox Brown and John Ruskin.