Andreas Petrossiants speaks with author Leigh Claire La Berge about Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art, published in November 2019 by Duke University Press. 

“The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.” Read more

Leigh Claire La Berge is associate professor of English at BMCC CUNY and author of Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s as well as co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism. Her writing and journalism has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Post-45, the Los Angeles REview of Books and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is  also a member of the Marx for Cats collective