Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics
Author: Dave Beech
Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy throughout classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption.
Key debates on the economics of art, from the high prices artworks fetch at auction, to the controversies over public subsidy of the arts, the 'cost disease' of artistic production, and neoliberal and post-Marxist theories of art's incorporation into capitalism, are examined in detail.
Subjecting mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics to an exacting critique, the book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.
On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art
Author: Dave Beech
This book provides a new history of the changing relationship between art, craft and industry focusing on the transition from workshop to studio, apprentice to pupil, guild to gallery and artisan to artist. Responding to the question whether the artist is a relic of the feudal mode of production or is a commodity producer corresponding to the capitalist mode of cultural production, this inquiry reveals, instead, that the history of the formation of art as distinct from handicraft, commerce and industry can be traced back to the dissolution of the dual system of guild and court. This history needs to be revisited in order to rethink the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, nonalienated labour and unwaged labour that shape the modern and contemporary politics of work in art.
Author: Dave Beech

Malcolm Quinn’s book, Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain, is an historical study of the birth pangs of the state-funded art school that interrogates the politics of art’s reproduction within the context of Victorian reformism in which the art school was proposed as a mechanism to improve the standards of taste of manufacturers and factory workers, as well as of artists, designers, art teachers and others. The review locates the political and cultural transition from the academy to the art school as the construction of a specifically bourgeois institution of art.

In: Historical Materialism
In: Art and Labour
In: Art and Labour
In: Art and Labour
In: Art and Labour
In: Art and Labour
In: Art and Labour