Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art

by Leigh Claire La Berge

The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.

Genres: Art, Theory

280 pages, Hardcover

Published August 23, 2019

About the author

Her work concerns aesthetics and political economy, broadly speaking. Her first book, "Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s" (Oxford, 2014), tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. Her second book, "Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art" (Duke, 2019) explored the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she called "decommodified labor," or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, she is the co-editor of the collection "Reading Capitalist Realism" (Iowa, 2014). She recently published a book about animality and economy entitled "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary," with Duke UP. She is currently completing a new book called "Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect that Capitalism is a Joke" about her experience with corporate labor, Y2K, and management consultants.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

701.03 L117 2019