ABSTRACT
The practices of art as politics are perhaps most challenged by the interrelated expansion of digital technologies and the intensified commodification of human processes. This chapter addresses this challenge by focusing on the turn to ontology by philosophers who are reevaluating the potentiality of objects. Surely the practices of art as politics are challenged by the interrelated expansion of the capacities of digital technology and the commodification of human processes as these undermine art's autonomy from the market and its singular claim to aesthetics. The chapter argues that object-oriented ontology, although differing from ontologies of becoming, can play a part in adjusting the latter to the fact that processes of becoming already are engaged fully in comodification and the market including the market in big data. Surely art, its objects and practices, are implicated in this discussion, as is a politics of commodification and the market.
