Economy

Based on substantial curatorial and academic research, the book proposes a new narrative for art produced globally from the 1990s to the present day: that art gradually shifted from an emphasis on cultural subjects associated with postmodernism to an exploration of economic relations. In an extensive Introduction, the editors and curators of the group exhibition ECONOMY (Edinburgh and Glasgow, 2013) outline the main argument, by examining the socio-economic context which led to the explosion of globalisation as crisis in 2008 as well as selected theorisations of that context and contemporary art. The essays in the volume, drawn from art theory, social studies and political economy, elucidate, enrich and complicate the core thesis. Themes addressed in the book include the relationship between art and property, the rise and contentious status of immaterial labour, socially engaged art and the exchanges between art and life, the role of gender and sexuality in the social relations and labour regimes instituted by capital today (including in the art world), the Occupy Movement, past figurations of the economy in a socialist imaginary embracing art, critical approaches to the commons, the migrant subject and a contemporary avant-garde. The essays illustrate the heightened interest of art after postmodernism in how we produce, rather than how consume, the signal elements in the confrontation between capital and labour that has come to define the passage from the 20th to the 21st century.