Issue #48: American Finance, the Global Market for Art, and the Need for Speed

This issue is structured around contemporary political and aesthetic debates focused on three books: The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From JP Morgan to BlackRock (Verso, 2024) by Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno; The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Larissa Buchholz; and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024). Included here are a range of responses to these books in the hope of generating more discussion around finance capital, the global art market, and the accelerated rate of consumption under capital.

Inside the issue

The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?

Jensen Suther December 12, 2024

At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value.” But this neglects Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, or labor as productive of value and labor as productive of objects of use. Contrary to Kornbluh, value is not “generated” by exchange but rather by the expenditure of labor time and realized through exchange. So long as value—labor time—is the measure of social wealth, workers must expend abstract labor in exchange for a wage, while the capitalist appropriates the products the worker has valorized. This implies that the form of distribution—the propertylessness of the worker—is grounded in the form of production itself.

The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock

Respondents December 12, 2024

Lapavitsas Epstein Leopold Maher and Aquanno Lapavitsas Finance capital and U.S. imperialism The re-emergence of finance capital in the U.S. economy? The recent book by Maher and Aquanno is an ambitious attempt to analyse the trajectory of U.S. capitalism during the last several decades. They delve primarily into the rise of the U.S. financial sector, aiming to draw conclusions about the broader development of U.S. capitalism and its geopolitical position. At the heart of the book lies the claim that

The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy

Respondents December 12, 2024

It is assumed that “thinking globally” is a moral imperative within the humanities. Is it? Among other things, it presumes a neutral space from which to expand one’s geographic purview, as though curators and scholars could stand outside the global game of profit and recognition. In this issue of The Tank, art historians and critics respond to sociologist Larissa Buchholz’s analysis of the global contemporary art field. Do globalizing initiatives really serve artists outside the Global North? Or do they refract neoliberal logics of concentrating capital and expanding markets? Has the global turn transformed our evaluative norms? Or has the very concept of “the global” become just another currency for meting out prestige?