Art and Capitalism
What is the work of art under capitalism? Is it a commodity? A luxury good? A financial investment? To the artist-owner, it might be intellectual property; to an AI company, it might be training data, copyright be damned. To the anthropologist, it is a technology of enchantment; to the sociologist, cultural capital objectified. To one Marxist literary critic, it is an imaginary resolution to real contradictions. These wellknown theories explain art’s role in reproducing society, although they seem to sidestep questions of the capitalist economy in particular. Yet even those who consider themselves experts of political economy struggle to explain the strange commodity that is the artwork: as the art critic David Beech argues, the value of art cannot be explained via Marxist theories of “socially necessary labor time,” nor via neoclassical economic laws of supply and demand.1 How should we understand the polysemous, muchdebated, exceptional commodity that is the artwork against the ever-changing backdrop of capitalism?
This working group in the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA) will bring together scholars across Rutgers to study how thinkers from the 18th century to the current day have conceptualized the place of the artwork within capitalist society. In our first semester, fall 2026, we will meet monthly to discuss readings from fields such as classical and neoclassical economics, historical sociology, legal studies, anthropology, material cultural studies, and Marxist feminism. A sample bibliography is provided below, and participants are encouraged to propose additional readings. Depending on the interest of participants, our second semester we will workshop writing that engages with the readings, questions, and debates raised by our collective study. If funding allows, we will invite scholars to present their research about significant transitions in the production, circulation, and consumption of art over capitalism's longue durée.
Organizers
Elliot Frank is a fifth year PhD student in English at Rutgers University. His dissertation re-examines the concept of “committed literature” within the context of 20th century American novels and combines approaches from Marxist literary criticism and the sociology of literature.
Email:
Tina Lupton is incoming Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is interested in the practices of reading and writing as they intersect with histories of gender and class from the eighteenth century onwards. Her current project, When Writing Wasn’t Work
tracks the history of life writing by workers as something that falls outside the matrix of professional or profit-making activity.
Email: