History, Use Value, and the Contemporary Work or Labour of Art

History, Use Value, and the Contemporary Work or Labour of Art examines the relationships between our current conception of contemporary art practice as work or labour and situates this within a historical discourse of work or labour as Use Value (re-Marx, Das Kapital, vol.1, 1867) or, more specifically, the idea that art, as a form of non-alienated labour, can act as both an aesthetic and ethical rebuff to the physical and mental alienation and fractalization of insturmentalized labour under our present conditions of neo-liberal globalization. As such the essay seeks to re—examine the relationship of aesthetics to politics in Rancière’s notion of a ‘meta-politics of aesthetics’ and to offer alternative ways of thinking through and beyond this binarism through a re-reading of ethical labour in Marx and Hegel’s proposition of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ in ‘The Phenomenology of Sprit’ (1807). The book What’s the Use? Consteallations of Art, History, and Knowledge: A Critical Reader, also contains articles by international writers John Ruskin, Adrian Rifkin, Georges Didi-Huberman, George Yúdice and artists Tania Bruguera and Liam Gillick