An-Aesthetic Autonomy: Rebuilding the Art World After Its Neoliberal Degradation

An-Aesthetic Autonomy

The internal dynamics of contemporary art’s ecology have been conducive to this trend [of financialisation, S.O.] insofar as the last decade has seen the erosion of non-market based funding structures for the arts as well as the thinning out of smaller and mid-sized galleries and collectors that were typically associated with supporting local artists as well as younger practitioners whose position has not yet been affirmed by the market, and those artists whose future value trend was equally uncertain. The corporatisation and monopolisation of the global contemporary art market through a consolidation of a top segment of globally distributed galleries and collectors, and a global network of freeports as traffic hubs, signal that it has been in the process of restructuring with the top end segment pivoting toward the financial sector.[13]

Isabelle Graw has recently qualified this process of structural transformation as one of resortisation.[14] Resortisation builds on many of the developments mentioned above. In part, Graw’s argument refers to international galleries opening branches in luxury enclaves such as the Hamptons, Aspen, or Monaco, as well as art businesses taking over villages or opening art-themed hotels in the Mediterranean to provide wealthy art lovers with the holistic experience economy they crave.[15] However, the focus of her analysis is on the contemporary art world going online, such as through the proliferation of online showrooms and growing importance of social media – Instagram above all – for the presentation of artworks. The Covid-19 pandemic has fuelled and accelerated this development, of course. It contributes to the process of an-aesthetic abstraction as online platforms tend to remove the artworks they present from the complexity and fullness of social life. It should be obvious that the logic of likes, shares, and hearts is not conducive to re-enacting the circuits of collective enjoyment, public reception, and critical (expert) appraisal as found in the analogue world. With a nod to the classical work of the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, Graw speaks of a ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere.’[16] As much as one’s bubble might market itself as a gateway to the digital commons, this is a thoroughly enclosed commons that is ruled autocratically by a handful of global mega-corporations who have privatised (squatted?) our shared social space of communication.[17] Their business model requires the reduction of our sociality to the two-dimensionality of users, consumers, and content as the precondition for its further processing into the raw material of digital rent extraction. If one can speak of democratic access here, it is that of being herded into the big data training camp.

This often includes the extra opportunity of unwittingly helping to perfect software on which oppressive control systems run.[18]

Apparently, few consequential art institutions can afford to go offline today, even though, as Graw puts it, ‘almost everyone takes a critical view of the platform companies’ machinations.’[19] While such implicit criticality may be ubiquitous in the world of contemporary art critique surrounding Texte zur Kunst, it hardly applies to the art world of, say, the Netherlands. Here, it is rather astonishing to see how art institutions and the public funds financing them continue to cling to the idea of social media as an innocent technological means for the purpose of increasing ‘visibility’. Graw and her colleagues are right that the visibility online platforms supposedly generate comes at a cost. According to Graw, the price to be paid is

the invisibility of those social contexts in which works of art are embedded. It becomes difficult or even impossible to understand what is historically at stake in a particular artwork ... For it is only through an approximative reconstruction of those contexts that we are able to grasp what a work is trying to propose or suggest. The problem is that these formative contextual conditions are difficult to convey online, and so they fall away. [20]

In other words, social media and online platforms are great for marketing and less useful for anything having to do with meaningful aesthetic expression. Unfortunately, one of the effects of Graw’s ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere’ is that art institutions seem to find it increasingly difficult to differentiate between the aesthetics of art and the an-aesthetic of marketing.

Graw’s important critique of social and historical reduction aside, what needs to be added is the an-aesthetic reduction inherent to the digital form itself, or, to be more precise, the digital form in its contemporary cultural-technological configuration. The experiential abyss between an immediate aesthetic encounter and its digitally mediated version has perhaps never been more vividly captured in writing than in Jonathan Crary’s meditation on the intricate beauty of the iris.[21] The functional flatness of the digital screen combined with the manipulative control of the very act of perceiving (eye tracking and other biometric technology) pre-empts the experience of the generative openness it would require to be qualified as aesthetic. As Juliane Rebentisch reminds us:

The term ‘experience’ refers to a process between subject and object that transforms both – the object insofar as it is only in and through the dynamic of its experience that it is brought to life as a work of art, and the subject insofar as it takes on a self-reflective form, its own performativity recurring in a structurally uncanny (or rather un-homely) way in the mode of the object’s appearance.[22]

Given the current techno-cultural configuration of much of the internet, there seems to be little room for aesthetic experience of the transformative kind described by Rebentisch. The best that awaits on social media platforms is what Venkatesh Rao has called the ‘premium mediocre’[23], i.e., ‘a smooth, quasi-safe environment that is constrained, slightly upbeat, but quietly so: no yelling. The environment induces us to feel less and to swipe faster’.[24] Again, this is the digital experience economy at its best/worst, but thanks to Rao, we’ve now got the corruption of aesthetic experience priced in. Doesn’t the ‘premium mediocre’ describe exactly what happens to everything that is being touched by the marketing logic of today’s digital platforms? If even the makers and owners of these technologies come out against them, then we should expect at least as much of those in whose hands lie the care of our collective sense organs.[25] Out of fear of appearing nostalgic or out of touch, they remain committed to the great digital swindle,[26] riveted to a screen whose promise of what David Foster Wallace called infinite jest[27]  has long turned into the premium mediocre of digital an-aesthesia.

Having said this, it is by no means my intention to dismiss contemporary artists who engage with the digital medium. There are plenty of examples of artists – the above cited Hito Steyerl is only one very prominent example among many – who use a great variety of aesthetic strategies to explore the complexities of digital technologies. What I’m trying to contest here is the popular fallacy of treating the digital as a neutral medium. There is now overwhelming empirical evidence as to the harmful effects of digital communication technology on the development of our children and youth.[28] A crucial factor highlighted by the relevant studies is the decline of embodied play caused by the compulsion of being riveted to the screen, which is an intended design feature of much of our current digital communication technology. If we consider contemporary art as society’s aesthetic playground that informs the quality of our social sensorium,[29] it should be clear that any meaningful engagement with the digital medium needs to address its inbuilt tendency to deplete our psychic and collective faculties of the imagination.

The End of Autonomy?

An-aesthetic autonomy provides a lens that enhances our view on the structural transformation of the financial and technological conditions of contemporary artistic practice. One needs to emphasise that the processes outlined above by no means determine the entirety of artistic practice today. However, considering the countless scholarly celebrations of cultural, creative, or, indeed, aesthetic capitalism,[30] it seems crucial to highlight the structural compression of our social sensorium that these approaches tend to ignore.

As Graw’s notion of the ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere’ indicates, the drive toward techno-financial an-aesthesia reverberates throughout the whole of society, destabilising an understanding of art that has been with us since the beginnings of European modernity. Its central element is the idea of aesthetic autonomy that designates art as a (relatively) independent field of social practice reserved for the exploration of aesthetic expression. As such, aesthetic autonomy is not just the dynamic essence of modern artistic practice but also a constituent element of modern subjectivity and, in the final analysis, an indispensable precondition of democratic citizenship.[31] To put it in a nutshell: the field of aesthetics provides a constantly evolving social sensorium, i.e., an independent experiential space for the development of our individual and collective imagination. As such, it can be, in the best of cases, a symbolic training ground for our affective and emotional capacities as social beings and a vestige where we can build and expand our empathic repertoire before stepping onto the sphere of politics. In this sense, an aesthetically autonomous field of artistic practice conditions our individual and collective capabilities as citizens. Those who welcome the end of autonomy [32] have so far failed to demonstrate why and how our societies have evolved beyond the socio-anthropological necessity of independent aesthetic exercise, or what the new sources of individual and collective imagination are that effectively replace the old autonomous training grounds.[33] Attempts to solve this problem by simply declaring the existence of artistic mind-sets or artistic intelligence [34] seem largely unaware of their own reliance on the neoliberal model of subjectivity that tried to fuse the figure of the romantic genius with that of the entrepreneur. The result is a double vulgarisation of autonomy that reduces both its individual and aesthetic dimensions to what Mark Fisher aptly called magical voluntarism,[35] that is, the infantile fantasy that one can be whatever one wants to be, regardless of social conditions.

Structural Decolonisation

Then the question is: How can artists and their allies effectively push back on the an-aesthetic onslaught on the art world and simultaneously engage in a project of constructing a timely equivalent of aesthetic autonomy? A very effective vehicle for such a project can be found in the current efforts to revise collections and curatorial practices according to the criteria of inclusivity and diversity. Provoked by the international Black Lives Matter movement and a general campaign to decolonise the Western canon, these are crucial and, in many cases, long overdue measures whose significance goes beyond simply ‘balancing’ collections and canons. They have the potential of generating the conditions for unprecedented aesthetic encounters that will not just benefit the contemporary art world but enrich the social sensoria of our societies. However, in order to be effective, the focus of these efforts should be expanded to also include the an-aesthetic structure of the contemporary art world. As Isabelle Graw explains:

by drawing critics’ attention, these welcome overtures and revisions have allowed another ongoing reorganization of the art economy to go unnoticed whose effect is the very opposite of diversity and decentring – it results in the exclusion of minorities and the consolidation of social homogeneity, the enforcement of conservative agendas, and the perpetuation of the principle of white supremacy, which is still deeply entrenched in parts of the art world. In other words, the growing political awareness in the art field and its progressive reorientation have oddly gone hand in hand with developments that have prepared the ground for a conservative backlash.[36]

If the structure of an-aesthetic autonomy remains intact, such a conservative backlash could easily end up being funded by anti- or decolonial artworks. All this would require is the insertion of these works into the turnstile infrastructure of quantified abstraction, thus turning them into financial assets to be utilised for whatever purpose, including racist politics or even violence. What this illustrates is that the important efforts of decolonial reprogramming within the contemporary art world run the risk of remaining cosmetic in their effects – or, in the worst case, being wickedly inverted against themselves – as long as the ongoing financial colonisation of its very structures remains uncontested.

The challenge that this entails has been elucidated by philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who points to the shortcomings of contemporary forms of identity politics that risk subverting the struggle for emancipation by limiting themselves to what he calls a politics of deference.[37] He links such politics of deference to standpoint epistemology that emerged in the context of feminist politics in the 1970s. Standpoint epistemology developed a theory of knowledge as being situated in social practice, thus claiming a certain epistemological advantage for the marginalised and oppressed when it comes to understanding the world. This was an essential theoretical tool for the practice of collective consciousness-raising and a crucial step in women’s epistemological empowerment against oppressive patriarchal structures.[38] The problem Táíwò sees regarding today’s deferential use of standpoint epistemology is that it tends to be mainly concerned with forms of representation, attitudes, distribution of attention, interpersonal dynamics, and so on. While these are not unimportant matters, addressing them without paying attention to the material structures of injustice and inequality undermines the struggle for emancipation. As he very succinctly writes:

The politics of deference focuses on the consequences that are likeliest to show up in the rooms where elites do most of their interacting: classrooms, boardrooms, political parties. As a result, we seem to end up with far more, and more specific, practical advice about how to, say, allocate tasks at a committee meeting than how to keep people alive.[39]

According to Táíwò, the politics of deference tend toward elitism as they aim at making social life more equal and just for a relatively exclusive group of people who are already enjoying privileged positions within inherently unjust social structures. Throughout his book, Táíwò uses the image of house building to illustrate his point. An effective politics of emancipation, he argues, needs to do more than demand just representation in the room, as this wrongly

focuses the very capacity that we have to reconstruct the whole house to the specific rooms that have already been built for us. It advertises itself as deferring to marginalized voices and perspectives, but in conceding so much creative space to the blueprint of society, it is perhaps better understood as deference to the built structure of society.[40]

Instead of a politics of deference, effective emancipation requires a politics of construction, a politics that takes itself serious enough to embark upon the project of rebuilding the entire house. For the contemporary art world, this would have to start from an acknowledgement of the an-aesthetic effects of its techno-financial architecture. The current deferential efforts to decolonise contemporary art need a qualitative overhaul to expand their scope to include the (re)construction of an infrastructure in which a broad, democratic participation in meaningful aesthetic practice and/or experience can be realised. If demolishing the towers (and dungeons) of an-aesthetic autonomy and their turnstile-ish technologies seems to be an impossible task, then perhaps at least some of the current deferential fervour could be redirected toward campaigning for the equivalent of a social housing programme for contemporary artistic practice.

Documenta 15: Social Housing for Contemporary Art

Looking back at Documenta 15, couldn’t one say that developing a social housing programme for contemporary art was almost exactly what the Jakarta-based artists’ collective Ruangrupa, who curated the exhibition in 2022, were trying to do? They based their curatorial practice on the principles and values inherent to the social architecture of the lumbung, a communal rice-barn that can be found in rural areas of Indonesia where the surplus harvest is stored for the benefit of the community. For the first time, the world’s most important contemporary art exhibition made a serious attempt to push itself – and thus, the international art world – beyond its own limits in regard to both its artistic content and its economic structures. Its ambition was to present artistic practices that fall outside the Western mould while organising the exhibition based on the principles of collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation. To achieve this, Ruangrupa split the budget among a network of 67 artist collectives, mainly from the Global South, who in turn invited other artists and collectives, which led to about one thousand people showing their work, giving talks or performances, tending vegetable plots, and, at least during the first few weeks, engaging with those visiting the communal spectacle.

Many of the artworks presented at Documenta 15 engaged with the lives of often marginalised communities and their cultural practices. There was quite a lot of work documenting the diversity of communal life in social, cultural, or political terms. The most exciting aspect of the exhibition was that it showed the many ways in which artistic practice can be an integral part of, or interwoven with, everyday life – even (or especially) if it is rather a challenging life. It’s true that there were those who found the pedagogical, propagandistic, or religious overtones of the works presented quaint, underwhelming, or even amateurish. However, during a time when throughout the West aesthetic experience (in Rebentisch’s sense) is increasingly pushed out of everyday life and art has come to be seen by a majority of people as a defining feature of an elitist class, isn’t it worth paying attention to how the connection between life and aesthetics is constructed elsewhere? Wouldn’t it be apposite to at least start a conversation on the meaning and importance of such communal aesthetic practice for our societies? As Justin O’Connor and I have argued,[41] there is a dormant European trajectory reaching from the communal luxury of the Paris commune[42] to Mark Fisher’s popular modernism whose reactivation and integration with approaches from the Global South could amount to a potential response to the question of cultural democracy that has been raised in recent years. The tragedy of Documenta 15 was that such an exchange was cut short before it had even started when it all came crashing down due to the antisemitism scandal. Whether this was indeed ‘infuriatingly avoidable’ as the New York Times commented at the time remains an open question.[43] What it showed was the extreme complexity involved in a decolonial effort that takes itself seriously enough to challenge the contemporary art world’s an-aesthehtic structures as well. One can only hope that some of the follow-up projects that proliferated after Kassel continue to feel committed to its rigour instead of falling back into the futile posturing of deferential politics.

Beyond Creative Industries

Another important approach to push back on the decadence of an-aesthetic autonomy consists in a radical overhaul of the creative economy policies that were implemented over the past thirty years all over Europe and Australia. Creative industries and creative city strategies promised a new synthesis of business and culture that would make our economies more diverse, just, and exciting. This was supposed to be a new kind of regeneration, linked to an aesthetics of democratic participation and networks of popular creative entrepreneurship. Cultural policy makers convinced themselves that they had finally found the recipe for socioeconomic development that served the many while being open for all kinds of colourful – even beautiful – forms of aesthetic expression. It was a powerful, irresistible imaginary that took the policy world by storm. There was only one problem with that new policy paradigm: its reality didn’t quite keep up with what the imaginary had promised. Rather than creating a culturally enriched economy based on a more diverse set of values that would lift the boat for the many, creative industries policies became neoliberalism’s arts and culture department, submitting the aesthetic disciplines to the ostensible economic rationalism that was applied to nearly all dimensions of the public sphere. Instead of making our urban life worlds more colourful and exciting, creative industries policies functionalised artists and cultural producers as vanguard decorators of cynical gentrification strategies that made our cities less affordable, destroyed space for (sub-)cultural expression and accentuated urban inequality thus contributing significantly to the emergence of what Richard Florida called the new urban crisis.[44] As an unfortunate if entirely expectable side-effect, these policies nurtured a widespread resentment against the arts and culture since they were experienced by large parts of the population as becoming inextricably linked with the gentrification of previously affordable neighbourhoods into creative enclaves for the wealthy. In economic terms, the promised mobilisation or flywheel effect of the creative industries never materialised in any significant shape or form throughout European economies. Much of this promise was based on the implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption that Silicon Valley’s technology and finance-driven business models provided templates for a networked entrepreneurialism in Europe: with a bit of tweaking, they could be transposed into the European context, unleashing a wave of unprecedented innovation that would lead to widespread welfare. Instead, they increasingly revealed their corrupt character, aggravating the systematic destruction of economic, social, psychological, and indeed planetary resources. There was certainly no wave of creative entrepreneurial innovation, as it turned out that economic precarity and financial insecurity are not ideal conditions for the kind of risk-taking and reckless exploration that meaningful discovery and invention necessitate.[45]

While the failure of the creative industries paradigm is now as blatantly obvious as that of the neoliberal project as a whole, it has led to a massive debilitation of the cultural ecosystems on which the artistic practice of every society relies. It substantially weakened what Gregory Sholette called ‘dark matter’,[46] i.e., the often commons-shaped network of artistic practice that exists somewhat invisibly underneath the threshold of commercial and professional artistic success yet sustains it as its indispensable breeding ground. Not only was it wrong to claim that creatives individually own the means of production,[47] but the informal social structures that sustain them also turned out to be rather precarious and often too fragile to survive the neoliberal battering.

Foundational Economy: Rebuilding the Social Sensorium

One of the few serious proposals to rebuild the social foundations for art and culture is outlined in two publications by cultural economist and policy scholar Justin O’Connor. As his point of departure, he takes the – by now commonsensical – diagnosis that the political and socio-economic system established in the 1980s is in deep crisis. Incapable of providing effective responses to the existential challenges (from climate to democracy) our societies are facing, it is increasingly obvious that any continued normalisation of neoliberal extremism – the market as the answer to every social challenge – will further contribute to their fatal acceleration. Instead of murmuring about a new normal, O’Connor suggests understanding our current historical moment in terms of an interregnum, i.e., a state of uncertainty between the end of the old and the emergence of the new. According to O’Connor, we need a reset of our shared understandings of art and culture, and the language in which we frame them. He constructs the contours of such a reset by drawing on new thinking from feminist, post-colonial, ecological, indigenous, and social enterprise movements that have all contributed to the increasing visibility of heterodox economics and alternative political futures. While recognising the thematic presence of these new ideas in contemporary arts and cultural practice, he finds them absent from much of public policy in the arts and culture. As he puts it, ‘the language remains one of markets, GDP, growth, entrepreneurship, business development, exports, econometrics and social policy impact.’[48] The reset he argues for is one that overhauls the very structures of value creation on which artistic and cultural production are presently based.

What makes O’Connor’s proposal so fascinating is that it combines a call for a renewed, rigorously timely understanding of the arts and culture with a very practical proposal for the sector’s social-economic transformation. His intention, he writes:

is to link a renewed framework for valuing and promoting arts and culture to a new transformative agenda, one that rejects economic rationalism and neoliberalism, and seeks to move our understanding of economic success away from GDP growth towards human well-being and flourishing.[49]

The concrete plan for such a transformative agenda he works out in an in-depth engagement with a group of heterodox economists who’ve collectively developed a model for what they call the foundational economy (Foundational Economy Collective, 2020).[50] They propose a programme of radical economic reform based on the reclamation of significant parts of economic activity from the market – including the liberation of previously public services from the extractive (and hence destructive) grip of financial investors – and their reorganisation in a massively yet intelligently expanded public economic sphere where the focus can be on quality of products and services rather than on unrealistic returns on investment. According to O’Connor, this renewed public sphere is also where the arts and culture belong, ‘alongside the social foundations of health, education, welfare and infrastructure.’[51] For him, this is more than just a question of policy strategy; it is a question of democratic principle. As he puts it:

The social foundations … must include the basic human desire for recognition, respect, purpose, and meaning derived from the social world in which we live. And reversely: A lack of social recognition and respect, of a sense of affiliation and belonging, meaning and purpose, contributes to the deep ontological insecurity of contemporary capitalism.[52]

O’Connor’s proposal is about the future of the arts and culture, or to be more precise, about a set of policies that would amount to a counterstrategy against the an-aesthetic degradation of contemporary art and culture. It is also an appeal to all those who work in or care about the arts and culture to campaign for an economic operating system that would be inclusive and diverse enough to generate the aesthetic practices we collectively need in order to have a future at all. ‘We have to start not with culture but economics,’[53] he writes, urging us to realise that a truly participatory cultural sector requires rebuilding its material foundations as well. Locating the arts and culture within the foundational economy would shield them from the structural degradation of an-aesthetic autonomy, opening the social sensorium – to repeat: the collective space that defines a society’s capacity to engage in sensory relations with its live-world – to an entirely new world of possible practices. There is a fascinating connection here to Táíwò’s critique of deferential politics. If Táíwò teaches us that the ambition of an effective politics of emancipation cannot exhaust itself in the demand for just representation in the room but needs to build a new house, O’Connor provides something akin to a blueprint for the construction of a new foundation for the arts and culture. Combining these two approaches offers a potential path out of the current an-aesthetic colonisation of contemporary art.

Conclusion: Recharging the Social Fabric

Historian Christopher Clark has recently pointed to the historical similarities between the revolutionary spring of 1848 and our current situation. While the events of 1848 set off Europe’s turbulent transition into the social and political structures of modernity, what we are seeing today is the systematic destabilisation of this historical formation that is not unlikely to lead to an equally momentous transition. At the beginning of the modern era, the emancipation of aesthetics as an autonomous field of social practice contributed to the evolution of a social sensorium that helped to absorb some of the convulsions out of which modern society emerged. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this didn’t deliver Europe from the loss of divine order or the conflicts and wars that accompanied it but facilitated their successful digestion. Artistic practice began to contribute to a sovereign social sensorium whose autonomous status enabled it to generate the symbolic resources that could then be used throughout other social spheres, trying to cope with the radical changes of the time.[54] As the edifice of modernity crumbles, it seems sensible to assume that the outcome of the looming transition will also depend on our ability to reconstruct a social sensorium that is up to the contemporary digestive challenge.

Decades of neoliberalism have not only accelerated our descent into environmental and social crisis but also depleted the aesthetic resources (both psychic and collective) that societies would need to successfully negotiate these profound challenges. The emergence of an-aesthetic autonomy can be seen as the present culmination of this development. One of its debilitating consequences is the loss of our ability to generate any effective vision of a desirable future. Within the world of contemporary art, this sometimes leads to the misunderstanding that today, artists should take up the task of imagining the future for society. While propositions of this kind are often put forward with the best of intentions, they remain captive to the neoliberal logic of creative industries, misconstruing artists as design consultants to whom the public challenge of social imagination can be simply outsourced.[55] However, as the above discussion has shown, envisioning a desirable future can only take place as a comprehensively collective process, as a broad conversation across society. The combination of Táíwò’s structural decolonialisation and O’Connor’s heterodox cultural economics offers a promising approach for the construction of the social and economic foundations such a conversation requires. It should be clear that none of this is going to happen overnight. In the meantime, the role of contemporary artistic practice could be to support this process by doing everything possible to aesthetically recharge the social fabric, i.e., replenishing the public with the symbolic, affective, imaginative, etc., resources that can enrich and accelerate the collective conversation toward a desirable future.

Sebastian Olma holds the research chair for Cultural and Creative Industries at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt) at Avans University of Applied Sciences. He is also the founding editor of the webjournal Making and Breaking. Alongside his academic work, he has advised policymakers throughout Europe on the facts and fictions of the creative economy. He lives in Amsterdam, where he is involved in (sub)cultural projects such as OT301 and Amsterdam Alternative. His publications include Art and Autonomy: Past, Present, Future (2018, V2_ Publishing) and In Defence of Serendipity: For a Radical Politics of Innovation (2016, Repeater Press).

The author would like to thank Sepp Eckenhaussen, Anielek Niemyjski and Jess Hendersen for their very helpful comments, editing and formatting of this longform. Special thanks go to Jess Hendersen for the brilliant image design. A different version of this longform appears as a chapter in Schramme, A., D’hoore, L. (2025). Contemporary Perspectives on Artistic Autonomy: Intersections of Art and Policy, London: Routledge.

[1] Victoria Ivanova, Gerald Nestler, 2020, ‘Art, Markets, and Finance’, in Christian Borch and Robert Wosnitzer (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, Routledge International Handbooks, New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, pp. 380-414.

[2] Marie-Madeleine Renauld, Geneva Free Port: The World’s Most Secretive Art Warehouse, The Collector, 1^st May 2021, https://www.thecollector.com/geneva-free-port-the-worldsmost-secretive-art-warehouse/.

[3] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, London: Verso, 2016; As Slobodian (2023) argues, freeports are a pivotal element in the effort to structurally detach capitalism from any form of democratic control and establish autocratic capitalism.

[4] It should be noted that for Peter Osborne, the “contemporary” in “contemporary art” already denotes the surrender of aesthetics to the non-space and non-time of capital:  “The concept of the contemporary involves a disavowal – a disavowal of its own futural, anticipatory or speculative basis – to the extent to which it projects into existence an actual total conjunction of times. This is a disavowal of the futurity of the present by its very presentness; essentially, it is a disavowal of politics” (2013, p.23). For a discussion of Osborne’s fascinating book see Olma 2018, Chpt. 10, pp. 68-76.

[5] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, London: Verso, 2016.

[6] Sebastian Olma, Art and Autonomy: Past – Present – Future. Rotterdam: _V2, 2018. 

[7] Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 documentary The Price of Everything provides a fascinating glimpse into this world.

[8] Victoria Ivanova, Gerald Nestler, 2020, ‘Art, Markets, and Finance’, in Christian Borch and Robert Wosnitzer (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, Routledge International Handbooks, New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, pp. 380-414.

[9] Nate Freeman, How Damien Hirst’s $200 Million Auction Became a Symbol of Pre-Recession Decadence, Artsy, 24 August 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-damien-hirsts-200-million-auction-symbolpre-recession-decadence.

[10] That this development amounts to a new quality becomes clear when read against the cautious assessments of financialisation from a decade ago (see, e.g., Maria Lind, Olav Velthuis (eds), Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, 2012, pp. 26-31).

[11] The financial crisis of 2008 being a prime example of the disastrous effects of such financialisation.

[12] See, by comparison, this brilliant description of what amounts to an intricate dance of art’s symbolic value and its market price from 2009: “The peculiarity of symbolic value is that it cannot be measured in terms of money, that it won’t translate smoothly into economic categories. What critics and art historians put forward as the aesthetic achievement of an artwork cannot be measured in terms of economic value, and certainly not converted into a price. At the same time, works of art undoubtedly have their price when circulating on the market—a fact dutifully glossed over by idealistic views of art as simply priceless. But this notion of symbolic value as something that cannot be measured in gold, something absolutely irreducible, also contains a grain of truth, and this is what makes the matter so complicated. In terms of its symbolic value, the artwork is priceless but has a price nonetheless. In other words, its symbolic value is not identical to its market value, and this in spite of the fact that is has a named asking price. This price, conversely, is justified with reference to a symbolic value that cannot be accounted for in financial terms. One might say, then, that the work’s price is based on the assumption that it is priceless. And this is also what makes the artwork a special kind of commodity: the fact that its market value is justified purely by its symbolic value, which in turn is an expression of the manner in which it is loaded with idealistic concepts” (Isabelle Graw, Symbolic Value, or: The Price of the Priceless. In High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Berlin: Sternberg, 2019, p.27, emphasis in the original).

[13] Victoria Ivanova, Gerald Nestler, 2020, ‘Art, Markets, and Finance’, in Christian Borch and Robert Wosnitzer (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, Routledge International Handbooks, New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, pp. 380-414.

[14] Isabelle Graw, Welcome to the Resort. Six Theses on the Latest Structural Transformation of the Artistic Field and its Consequences for Value Formation. Texte zur Kunst 127: Resortization. September 2022, pp. 43-70, https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/127/isabelle-graw-welcome-to-the-resort/.

[15] For the concept of the experience economy, brought to its full cynical flourishing by resortisation, comp. Pine & Gilmore, 1999.

[16] Graw, Welcome to the Resort.

[17] Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, Boston: Beacon Press, 2022.

[18] Hito Steyerl, Mean Images. New Left Review, 140/141(Mar/June 2023), pp. 82–97, https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii140/articles/hito-steyerl-mean-images.

[19] Graw, Welcome to the Resort.

[20] ibidum

[21] Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. London: Verso, 2022. To give the reader a sense of the urgency conveyed in Crary’s critique, I quote the following passage in full: “Until the very recent past, the exterior of the eye, with the iris its most vivid feature, had cultural meaning as a defining element of human face-to-face encounters. For thousands of years, in many different cultures, the iris was the presence in the body of a flickering chromatic vivacity, akin to natural phenomena such as rainbows or flowers. However, unlike the fleeting occurrence of a rainbow or the transience of flowers, the iris persists in the body for a lifetime. A shared gaze always holds the promise of a glimpse of iridescence, whether between friends, lovers, or strangers. Neither opaque nor transparent, the iris and its elusive colours shimmer and in their gentle dazzlement some mystery at the heart of the other is withheld. It is moreover the iris, with its contractile muscles, that constantly adjusts the size of the pupil to control the amount of light entering the eye. It has a rhythmic response to the illumination or darkening of the world. Amid the fluctuations of light, the appearance of the iris, its aqueous translucence, modulates and resists chromatic stabilization. How often have we noticed of someone we know well that the colour of their eye shifts in different light? A wonder of the iris is that, for an observer, it is never identical to itself: its colours are not static and thus unpossessable” (p.104).

[22] Juliane Rebentisch, Response to the Questionaire on ‘The Contemporary’. October 130, 2009 p.100-103.

[23] Venkatesh Rao, The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial. Ribbonfarm. 17 August 2017, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-lifeof-maya-millennial/.

[24] Geert Lovink, Notes on the Platform Condition. Making & Breaking. Vol. II: The Post-Contemporary, 2021, https://makingandbreaking.org/article/notes-on-theplatform-condition/.

[25] With regard to the engineers’ critique of their own creations, Jeff Orlowski’s documentary The Social Network features a number of surprisingly devestating statements. As Douglas Rushkoff (2022) has shown, tech billionaires understand perfectly well how destructive (psychologically, socially and planetary) their businesses are which is why they are feverishly looking for ways to escape the coming apocalypse.

[26] Mark Fisher, The Great Digital Swindle. In S.Olma. In Defence of Serendipity. For a Radical Politics of Innovation. London: Repeater, p. 7-9, https://repeaterbooks.com/the-great-digital-swindle-by-mark-fisher/.

[27] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. A Novel, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.

[28] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, New York: Penguin Press, 2024.

[29] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Keith Tribe, New York: Penguin Classics, 2016.

[30] Comp. Gernot Böhme, Ästhetischer Kapitalismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2016; Scott Lash & Celia Lury, Global Culture Industries. The Mediation of Things. London: Polity, 2007; Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

[31] Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity. (2nd Ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; Justin O’Connor, Culture Is Not an Industry. Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common Good. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024.

[32] Wolfgang Ullrich, Die Kunst Nach dem Ende Ihrer Autonomie. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2022.

[33] Diederichsen (2022) provides a scathing, yet in its core entirely apposite, critique of Ullrich’s premature celebration of post-autonomous art.

[34] Merlijn Twaalfhoven, Het Is aan Ons. Waarom We de Kunstenaar in Onszelf Nodig Hebben om de Wereld te Redden. Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2020.

[35] Mark Fisher, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), London: Repeater, 2018, pp.467-468.

[36] Graw, Welcome to the Resort, p.48.

[37] Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), London: Pluto Press, 2022.

[38] Nancy C. M. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays, Feminist Theory and Politics, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.

[39] Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), p.72.

[40] Ibid, p.83.

[41] Sebastian Olma & Justin O’Connor, Communal Luxury: An Introduction. Making & Breaking. Vol. III: Communal Luxury, 2023, https://makingandbreaking.org/article/communal-luxury-an-introduction/.

[42] Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, London: Verso, 2015.

[43] Siddhartha Mitter, Documenta Was a Whole Vibe. Then a Scandal Killed the Buzz, New York Times, 24 June 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/arts/design/documenta-review.html.

[44] Richard L. Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

[45] For a contemporary critique of this ideology see also my In Defence of Serendipity (Olma, 2016).

[46] Gregory  Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto Press, 2011.

[47] Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

[48] Justin O’Connor, Reset: Art, Culture and the Foundational Economy, Adelaide: CP3, 2022, https://resetartsandculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CP3-Working-Paper-Art-Culture-and-the-Foundational-Economy-2022.pdf, p.2.

[49] Ibid, p.15

[50] For an engagement with culture from another heterodox economic perspective see: McCartney et al., 2023.

[51] Justin O’Connor, Culture Is Not an Industry. Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common Good. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024, p.4.

[52] Ibid, p.111.

[53] Justin O’Connor, Reset: Art, Culture and the Foundational Economy, Adelaide: CP3, 2022, https://resetartsandculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CP3-Working-Paper-Art-Culture-and-the-Foundational-Economy-2022.pdf, p.11.

[54] Sebastian Olma, Art and Autonomy: Past – Present – Future. Rotterdam: _V2, 2018. 

[55] See Mazzucato and Collington (2023) for a devestating critique of the current practice of (public service) outsourcing.