Nina Power - How to Find a Better Life? | Review 31
The flip-side of the structural inequality of the art world, a curious microcosm of the global financial system that massively overlaps with it at the level of speculation and the increasing abstraction of ‘value’ that art currently symbolises, is the kind of work – constant, frenetic, networked, endless, overlapping, highly libidinally-charged but exhausting - that characterises freelance art world labour. A poster on the Precarious Workers Brigade’s website asks ‘Do you freelance but don’t feel free?’ and ‘Are you anxious during the day and sleepless at night?’ Identifying the material conditions whereby work and its unpaidness are interlinked is the task of many of the essays here. Rather than posing this question in the usual way – namely, how does art ‘deal with’ politics? Can artwork ‘be’ political? – Hito Steyerl discusses ‘the politics of the field of art as a place of work’. Contemporary art, she argues, is ‘squarely placed in the neoliberal thick of things’. A ‘brand name without a brand’, it ‘lends primordial accumulation a whiff of post-conceptual razzmatazz’ and is in practice, the answer to the question ‘How can capitalism be made more beautiful?’ So far: recognisable, acutely described and utterly depressing.
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