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Book Review: Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism
Danielle Child's book tackles the neoliberal penetration of artistic production from a Marxist perspective
Bookshelf

Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism
by Danielle Child
(Bloomsbury, £21.99)

UNUSUALLY for a young art historian, Danielle Child bases her discussion of the relationship between contemporary art, labour and capitalism on the “Marxian” ideology that art, as part of the superstructure, is defined by its economic base.

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Tracing these to the era’s “prehistory” in the late 1960s and 1970s, she explains how monumental public art projects such as those of Claes Oldenburg were fabricated by new, specialist firms.

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