Art and Capitalism

Art is integrated in the current economic system that is capitalism. The presuppositions of capitalism are "private property, the separation of labor, capital, […]and likewise of wages, profits and ground rent; also, the division of labor, competition and the concept of exchange value" (Marx, Alienated Labour, 1977, p. 365). Thus, art, as private property has an exchange value. In the free trade world, the production cost can decrease if the production is increased so the product can maintain a low cost, yet the profit would increase (Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, 1977). Since in art the product is in general unique or limited, the product is more valuable, and this would reflect on the market value. The integration of art in the system of capitalism is unavoidable. Just like the bourgeoisie wanted more freedom of trade and less taxes from the royal court, the artists also needed more freedom of expression and less interference from the controlling authority. Therefore, Art was able to go outside the Salon controlled by the state and gain its own autonomy. This introduced art to business, because capital owners can invest in art as a product in order to make profit. Many artists tried to fight the idea of capitalism or to rebel upon the capitalization of art, and some used a capitalist strategy such as the strategy of the 'multiples' used by Soto or Manzoni. The Multiples we are discussing here are not the kinetic multiples. Multiples are the creation, using technology, of the exact same product in a limited or unlimited quantity. It is important to note that the production of multiples is in fact a result of the industrial revolution and is one of the most important pillars of capitalism. Consequently, in this manner, does the artistic product lose its aura and become just another gadget or can artists succeed to question capitalism using a capitalist strategy? In the following, we will discuss the inter relations of art and capitalism, we will introduce the different political strategies that art can use against the authority and finally, we will attempt to defend the anti-capitalism approach of the production of multiple, knowing that production of multiples is a manifestation of capitalism.

Questions and experiences regarding the Ethics of representing "others", especially women's and moderate's voices in art and film, from the perspective and professional life of a feminist artivist mamactivist.

I explore three major examples :
A group exhibition of women artists, in which the places of honor and prestige were given to... men.
A solo photography exhibition project on motherhood in which I purposely and intentionally use my subjective voice as a conscious act of rebellion. Because a woman who shows and tells the truth about her subjective experience of mothering was (and still is) quite revolutionary.
The money and media power manipulations going on behind the scenes of an award winning documentary film about women's voices in areas of conflict. Specifically Women's voices regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

Renewed and updated by Author -2016.
Originally Commissioned and Published in 2009 by Maarav (Ambush), one of Israels' leading art and culture online magazines, under the double title "Whose voice is it anyway?" and "Any Woman in the Director's chair?"
(link) http://www.maarav.org.il/english/2009/07/any-woman-in-the-directors-room/

This article argues that the artistic-cultural work of the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) from the mid-1990s commenced on what tentatively can be called an "extraterritorial theatre practice" that engaged with the modern state’s capacity to make national identity singular in the interests of political, military and economic goals, and in which cultural formation and identity must exceed the nation-state’s purview. The present, “globalised” moment requires freedom from local jurisdictions: this is the line of thought regarding a truly contemporary theatre’s direction cut short by his demise in 2002. Two plays represent Kuo’s new direction: "Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral" (1995) and the "The Spirits Play" (1998 and 2000). His deliberations on contemporary art and culture draw from older ideals of modern cultural formation and is conjoined, it may be contradictorily, with postmodernism’s rhetoric of the decentred and the multiple; but if so, this contradiction becomes an adumbration of the fraught attributes of the contemporary.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded it was hard to keep up with all the stories of food, both good and bad, that shaped the way we experienced and are still experiencing this crisis. From stories of mutual aid via community fridges and gardens and the experience of empty supermarket shelves as supplies of tinned tomatoes and dried pasta were snatched up to the images of agricultural workers on strike throughout India, the politics of food was firmly in focus. This article explores the way conceptions of the metabolism has shaped global economic theory and also provided a challenge to our oun human subjectivity.  Statements from the chat from a Food Art Research Network & School of Instituting Otherwise workshop called Disorganising Metabolisms are woven through the first half of this text as floating, unresolved and undigested fragments, drawing attention to the registers of metabolic thinking. The second half turns to a discussion of the recent performative artwork by Keg de Souza, Not a Drop to Drink, which took place at Arts House, Melbourne in 2021

This essay queries the conditions for various forms of art and cultural practices to develop anti-systemic and anti-capitalist efficacy, in relation to contexts of social movement struggles. In Agata Stopinska, Anke Bartels, and Raj Kollmorgen (eds.), Revolutions: Reframed, Revisited, Revised (Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 239-251.

Considering the practices of the Situationist International, this chapter for the edited volume Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique re-reads Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde and critiques the current tendency to use Bürger's book as authority for dismissing radical political projects and positions. This essay revisits the question of what a radical and critical theory of art would be.

In global terms, creative industries are on the rise, as are new media investigations in art and initiatives that encourage innovation in the arts, for end-use in the economy. However, there is a significant lack of critical reflection on this form of creative production. This important book points out the dangers and downfalls that accompany such a boom of the creative industries and the subordination of art to the economy and politics. Specifically, it shows that art, as a mode of social and aesthetic practice, is losing the very thing which it has striven for so desperately in the course of modernity: its independence from other spheres of human activity.

Special issue on 'Kuo Pao Kun: Art, Culture, Capitalism'. Overview of issues in relation to Kuo's theatre development. There is no preview: the document will need to be downloaded.

The bilingual playwright, theatre director and public intellectual Kuo Pao Kun, who was born in 1939 in Xiaoguo village, Hebei, China, passed away on 10 September 2002, having been ill since the previous year. In one of a number of tribute articles that appeared in the major English-language paper, the Straits Times, one socio-cultural commentator acutely contends that Kuo is “the most important cultural figure in Singapore’s history” (Janadas 2002, 55).1 When detained in 1976 under security laws spawned by the Cold War, he “work[ed] on himself, and emerged from it refined and spare, stripped of superfluities, but he did not, in the process, abandon his ideals. He did not, to use a word from those times, break” (Janadas 2002, 56). Proceeding from and continuous with Chinese letters from the early twentieth century, Kuo’s work is prompted by the question, “What is Chinese modernity?” — and that enquiry latterly extended into an examination of “the Asian present” (Janadas 2002, 58).

The assessment captures Kuo Pao Kun’s distinctive place in Singapore’s cultural history. Culture (in both senses of “ways of life” and “artistic achievement”), politics and economic development are not easily separated in his art, and this remains so before and after his detention: the cultural self and the political self remain tightly intertwined. The morphing of modernisation theory from the Cold War (with its commitment to industrialisation and social progress) into discourses on globalisation (with its emphases on finance, information technology and the service sector) can be traced in his art, for these changes carry implications for culture and the formation of a contemporary art. Indeed, he placed his artistic-intellectual capacities in the service of a long-term engagement with the historical and contemporary upheavals, both positive and negative, that the attempt to become modern entailed, broadly taken, in Singapore and the larger region. From Singapore’s postcolonial nation-building process during and after the years of the Cold War, to the fate of cultural and linguistic diversity as a result of the city-state’s socio-engineering of its citizens in accordance with the standards linked with the “decade of development” in the 1960s thought necessary to “support the growth of infrastructure and industrialization” (UNICEF 1996), to the dangers of Asian nationalism in the age of transnational capital, Kuo’s art concerns itself with peoples and cultures unhoused or displaced. There is a persistent interest in the multiplicity of things, and with the scarcity of shared ideals on culture and society. And yet, despite the difficulty of thinking new versions of wholeness — itself potentially oppressing, Kuo was aware — his art and thought implies that being unhoused and displaced can force us to look for new places to stand and to live. [...]