Artistic Labour Now

Based on a symposium initiated by Isabelle Graw and Daniel Birnbaum at Frankfurt's Stadelschule, Artistic Labour Now considers the relationship between the value-form of the unique artwork and the subject position of its maker in relationship to key artists and theorists. In these collected essays, art historians, critics, artists, and writers approach modern and contemporary artistic labour from numerous angles, including Marxist theories of value, feminist theories of reproductive labour and contemporary theories of affective and immaterial labour. Contributors also shed light on the specificity of artistic labour in view of an increasingly globalized and digitized art economy, considering emergent possibilities for producing and distributing art created by recent developments in virtual reality, blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies within today's immersive media landscape. In this expansive new sphere, notions of value, labour and economy in the broadest sense must be renegotiated, as the lines between specificity and generality, materiality and immateriality, production and reproduction are blurred. Foreword by Isabelle Graw. Contributions by Christian Berger, Sabeth Buchmann, Huey Copeland, Aria Dean, Simon Denny, Larisa Dryansky, Silvia Federici, Josh Kline, Jaleh Mansoor, Friederike Sigler.