Not Being Able to Work That Way as an Endangered Ability—Jack Smith,Das Kapital: Volumes I, II, and III

Objects, Commodities There is an anticapitalist theory of art implicit in many artistic practices that identifies the locus of capitalism and the cultural industry aesthetically within the objects, which in this discourse are defined as fetishes. In this critique, artworks exaggerate or enhance the negation of use value and the dominance of exchange value in regular commodities until the status of a fetish is reached, which becomes something like the absolute and religious other of use value.