Using similar examples from your own explorations of the subject, discuss how changes in the methods of production influenced class-based social justice artistic expression from the 20th into the 21st century.

Module 5 Discussion

First, read the following excerpt from Sholette, Gregory, and Kim Charnley. Delirium and Resistance: Activist art and the crisis of capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2017.

…dizzying contradictions …have come to define contemporary art in the era of neoliberal capitalism. This includes rocketing prices that some artworks command in the global market, but also the rising tide of artistic activism focused on social injustice (including seeking fair economic compensation for art workers themselves).

…these materializing conflicts are amplified when artists focus their practice beyond artistic concerns to address social and political concerns in the “real world.” … how can a truly critical and politically resistant artistic culture be possible when art is becoming entangled and perhaps even subsumed within capitalist forms of production, marketing and financialization?

If an essential feature of artistic practice has been its centuries-old autonomy (whether real or imagined) from worldly economic and political matters, then art’s increasingly far-reaching and radical complicity with capital generates not only a dilemma, it forms a virtual ontological state of contradiction for all artistic practices. … this problem is especially vexing for those modes of contemporary art that self-identify as socially engaged, interventionist, or activist in nature.

… For while all art encounters the contradiction of its own entrepreneurial marketization that follows and disciplines the artist herself from classroom to exhibition space and beyond, the committed activist artist must also contend with the paradox of producing work that is always already caught up in a system it openly opposes and deplores.

Instructions for this Discussion

For this discussion, using similar examples from your own explorations of the subject, discuss how changes in the methods of production influenced class-based social justice artistic expression from the 20th into the 21st century.

Be sure to address Sholette and Charnley’s concerns regarding “commodification” to address whether these influences strengthened or weakened the impact social justice arts have as a form of class-based critique.