ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical overview of the approaches that inform theorizations and practical applications of art’s relationship to finance. The analysis focuses on the institution of contemporary art and the global financial order, both of which can be said to represent the hegemonic forms of art and finance today. A central question concerns the structural role of the art market system and its institutions as, on the one hand, places of “collision” between business and critical approaches, and, on the other, fertile grounds for symbiosis insofar as critical art endows the market with value. While it is often argued that this dynamic attests to the all-encompassing reach of financialization, it equally points to the limitations of the critical approach in generating positions vis-à-vis finance that transcend the circular feedback between criticality and financialization as the two only possible ways of conceiving the relationship between art and finance. Thus, the larger ambition of this text is to start sketching a progressive vision for art and finance that departs from the functions that they perform within today’s dominant systems of governance.
