Arts in Society: Being an Artist in Post-fordist Times (2009)

This is a much recommended and up to date book for people interested in themes like artistic labour,creative economy and post-Fordism.It throws insights into the ways that artists and critics from distinct backgrounds respond to the theoretical framework of post-Fordism-set in the first two texts by the philosophers Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt .

Cool Capitalism

The principal thesis of Jim McGuigan in his Cool Capitalism (2009) is pretty straightforward:

“Capitalism is legitimized today through the extraordinary incorporation of dissent.” (xi)

Capitalism spectacularly incorporates the critique directed against it in order to reproduce itself, by transmogrifying it into something ‘cool’. As Boltanski and Chiapello note in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), more or less everybody today understands that capitalism is an ‘absurd system’ since “wage earners are obliged to surrender labour power to exploitation and accept a life of subordination to the rich and powerful”. The most obvious complain then would be: “Why people continue to accept it?” Capitalism should come with some cunning justifications for its raison d’être in order to keep people tranquil. According to McGuigan, the most effective justifications that capitalism can come up with are to be found in the terrain of its opponents, namely in the critique leveled against it: