PARSE Journal Issue 9: 'Work'

Recent debates on work have increasingly incorporated the figure of the artist and forms of political engagement in art. Creative labour has occupied a central place in the critical re-assessment of work, since the publication in 1999 of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s sociological study of the transformation of work via the analysis of the recuperation of avant-garde values into management discourse. Concurrently, artists and other art workers have increasingly embedded the politics of art and the critique of art’s institutions in the strategies of worker activism such as the withdrawal of labour, demands for wages and employment rights.

The editors hope that this collection will enrich debates at the intersection between art and work and prompt further discussion of what is at stake—both practically and theoretically—when considering art and the politics of work as central to how we think about the contemporary world and how we can change it.