Artistic Labour Now Between Specificity and Generality, Materiality and Immateriality, Production an d Reproduction

On the specificity and generality, materiality and immateriality, production and reproduction of artistic labor.

Artistic Labour Now sheds light on the specificity of artistic labour in view of an increasingly globalized and digitized art economy.

In these collected essays, art historians, critics, artists, and writers consider emergent possibilities for the production and distribution of 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.

In Artistic Labour Now, contributors examine modern and contemporary artistic labour to contemplate the relationship between the value-form of the unique artwork and the subject position of its maker from numerous angles, including Marxist theories of value, feminist theories of reproductive labour and contemporary theories of affective and immaterial labour. 

Contributors
Christian Berger, Sabeth Buchmann, Huey Copeland, Aria Dean, Simon Denny, Larisa Dryansky, Sylvia Federici, Isabelle Graw, Josh Kline, Michelle Kuo, Jaleh Mansoor, Friederike Sigler

Isabelle Graw is the publisher of the journal Texte zur Kunst, which she cofounded with Stefan Germer (1958–1998) in 1990, and professor of art history and art theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Her previous books include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, and High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture.

Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art critic, theoretician, and curator. He was the director of the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna Museet) in Stockholm from 2010 to 2018, and currently directs the VR company, Acute Art.