Freeing the Ghost in the Machine. From Care Work towards a New Approach to Creative Work and Art Mediation

Abstract

The current historical time is characterized by many crises that are deeply affecting bodies and their politics, amongst which feminist movements have highlighted an urgent “crisis of care”. This paper discusses how this crisis permeates all realms, affecting the art world as well, and suggests that a historical perspective on the intersections between care work and creative work in the context of body politics can provide efficient investigative tools to address specific contemporary art field-related labor issues. The role and number of intermediaries involved in the process of artistic and cultural production tend to be all the more invisible, unrecognized, and exploited as the art world becomes an increasingly important and complex economic market. Under capitalist relations of production, the work of many is deemed economically unproductive although it is essential in sustaining the economy as such. This is an important, urgent, and growing cultural debate, which needs expanding within interdisciplinary research fields, as this paper suggests and demonstrates.