Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art
- Submitting institution
-
University of the Arts, London
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 520
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Brill
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-32151-9
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Art & Labour ‘re-narrativises’ the relationship between art, craft and industry, posing the claim that art constitutes a specific mode of production (a social form of labour) distinct from both pre-capitalist modes and of capitalist manufacture. The book demands that we “re-think the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, non-alienated labour and unwaged labour that shape the modern and contemporary politics of work in art” (p. 1). In so doing, the book revisits “the philosophical inquiry into the ontology of art from the perspective of the politics of labour” (p. 49). It provides a new history of the changing relationship between art, craft and industry, focusing on the transition from workshop to studio, apprentice to pupil, guild to gallery and artisan to artist. Responding to the question of whether the artist is a relic of the feudal mode of production or is a commodity producer corresponding to the capitalist mode of cultural production, this inquiry reveals, instead, that the history of the formation of art as distinct from handicraft, commerce and industry can be traced back to the dissolution of the dual system of guild and court. This history needs to be revisited in order to rethink the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, nonalienated labour and unwaged labour that shape the modern and contemporary politics of work in art.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
