Full Description
What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on work in art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, essays in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century frame and substantiate the increasing attendance to economic relations as a defining trend in contemporary art's history and one that brought to an end the hegemony of the cultural subject encountered in postmodern discourse.
Contributions include reflections on art in its relation to property as well as to 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 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, and a range of perspectives on 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, including socially engaged practices, seeking to connect 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.
Contributors: Massimo de Angelis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Melanie Gilligan, Kirsten Lloyd, Renate Lorenz, Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos, Andrea Phillips, John Roberts, Alberto Toscano, Gregory Sholette, Marina Vishmidt.
Editors: Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh
Kirsten Lloyd is Teaching Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Curator at Stills, Edinburgh
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Contributors
INTRODUCTION
'The Last Instance': The Apparent Economy, Social Struggles and Art in Global Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
PART 1: 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
PART 2: 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
Index
