The Work of Art and the Art of Work

Jasper Bernes's The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization explores the relationship between art and labor in the US from roughly the 1950s to the present. With examples ranging from John O'Hara to Flarf poets, The Work of Art contends that the output of neo-avant-garde writers and artists both critically responded to and inadvertently facilitated major socioeconomic transformations during the period. Specifically, Bernes elaborates how a set of terms and concepts employed by heterodox postwar artists and writers were taken up by workers in their qualitative critiques of work only to be swiftly co-opted and strategically reformatted by management theorists and corporations, resulting in post-Fordist workplace regimes that entailed the qualitative worsening of work. Looking not only backward but also forward, The Work of Art speculates on both the future of work in an era of ongoing economic stagnation and the forms of literary and artistic critique that might prove most effective as automation continues apace and surplus populations rise.