Wages Against Artwork

“This highly original work of Marxist aesthetic theory is a must-read for anyone interested in art and capitalism. Leigh Claire La Berge's thought experiment on how labor might go unpaid and still in a nontrivial way remain labor intersects in fascinating ways with arguments about reproductive labor made by feminists and brilliantly cleaves through mainstream academic culture's increasingly entrenched alternatives of using either ‘biopolitics’ and ‘real subsumption’ to understand our contemporary economy. I learned so much from this book and it still keeps me thinking.” - Sianne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting

“In elaborating a concept of ‘decommodified labor,’ Leigh Claire La Berge offers a fresh and provocative frame that changes how we understand the dynamics of art, labor, and social change. Marshalling a range of case studies on both established and emerging artists, Wages against Artwork is a fantastic contribution to an ongoing dialogue on the arts, on economics, and on how we define the social in socially engaged art.” - Shannon Jackson, author of Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics

“The biggest contribution of this book is to put economic and aesthetic theory together, to see what happens when the aesthetic is subjected to a Marxist analysis.... La Berge’s well-reasoned, engaging, and thorough book is a wonderful addition to the fields of Marxism, aesthetics, and performance.” - Joseph Richards, Houston Review of Books

“Wages Against Artwork is not just for those interested in art, but rather anyone concerned with the state of labor and widespread economic precarity in the twenty-first century. . . . La Berge asks us to consider not whether art can be commodified but whether it should be."