Teach-in: Art and Commodity Form (New York)

Teach-in by Allison Hewitt Ward held at New York University on March 23, 2017.

If the commodity-structure has been the defining feature of modern capitalism, it stands to reason that the development of art has followed its logic as well. Art, however, seems to be deeply ambivalent about its commodity status and bourgeois development. How might an examination of the emergence of "art" as we know it alongside the emergence of bourgeois society and the dominance of the commodity structure help us understand its present confusion?