The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.

Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, author of Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s, and coeditor of Reading Capitalist Realism.

Preface: The Argument  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: Socially Engaged Art and Decommodified Labor  1
1. Art Student, Art Worker: The Decommodified Labor of Studentdom  34
2. Institutions as Art: The Collective Forms of Decommodified Labor  75
3. Art Worker Animal: Animals as Socially Engaged Artists in a Post-Labor Era  118
4. The Artwork of Children's Labor: Socially Engaged Art and the Future of Work  157
Epilogue: Liberal Arts  198
Notes  205
Bibliography  239
Index  249