Art's Freedom Isn't Dying in Capitalism—It's Being Reshaped by It
A new analysis argues that contemporary art's independence isn't threatened by market forces, but actually strengthened by capitalism's current instability. For cultural institutions and investors betting on art's future relevance, the finding reframes how autonomy itself should be understood in an economically stressed landscape.
Originaltitel: The Social Form of Contemporary Art’s Autonomy
The aim of this article is to construct a concept of contemporary art's autonomy specific to the period of the past three to four decades understood as contemporary global capitalism. It does so first by demonstrating how the notion of autonomy, in Western philosophy, is historico-philosophically tied to the notion of form in the individual artwork. Second it makes a close reading of Adorno's understanding of form as sedimented content and makes a critique of it through his reading of Marx and the latter's understanding of value in capitalism as a social form. Adorno's notion of the artwork's autonomy as sedimented content is in the article transformed into the artwork's autonomy as social form and put in dialogue with more recent thinking on the current state of contemporary capitalism. The conclusive argument is that contemporary art's autonomy is not threatened but conditioned by contemporary capitalism's stagnant and crisis-ridden state.