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This book provides a ground breaking re-examination 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 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, Beech 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 essential 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.
“Beech’s book is most important as a critique of would-be Marxist orthodoxies in the fields of art history and cultural commentary [...] Art and Value undoubtedly leaves us in a much better position to formulate a proper economics of art.”
—Jasper Bernes and Daniel Spaulding, Radical Philosophy
Dave Beech, Ph.D., is Reader in Art and Marxism at CCW, University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Value (Haymarket, 2016) and Art and Postcapitalism (Pluto, 2019).
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Art, Labour and Abstraction
2 Arts, Fine Arts and Art in General
3 Guild, Court and Academy
4 Salon, Museum and Exhibition
5 Mechanic, Genius and Artist
6 Aesthetic Labour
7 Attractive Labour
8 Alienated Labour
9 Nonalienated Labour
10 The Critique of Labour
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index