On Artistic Autonomy as a Bourgeois Fetish

This contribution from Sarah Brouillette and Joshua Clover demonstrates how the separation of class from identity has become foundational to a particular mode of aesthetic theory, one that insists on the autonomy of the work of art. These theorists believe not only that can the work of art be separated from the social whole in which it was created but also that this very separation is source of art’s political force. Brouillette and Clover argue, instead, that capitalist value flows through art and culture in a dynamic way. This totalizing standpoint stresses the historical trajectory of capitalism’s development, de-development, eclipse, and the shifting forms of cultural expression that emerge and decline alongside it.