Reading List

Evolving, not exhaustive: email us with suggestions for labor-related texts that have been meaningful to you.

A Guidebook of Alternative Nows  edited by Amber Hickey 

A Manual for the Immaterial Worker  by Bureau for Open Culture

A Postcapitalist Politics  by JK Gibson-Graham 

Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters  by Lincoln Cushing & Timothy W. Drescher

AIDS Demo Graphics  by Douglas Crimp 

Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art  edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle

Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future  by Carlos Garrido Castellano

Art and the 99%  by Erin Sickler

Art and Value  by Dave Beech

Art Futures  by Anthony Davies and Simon Ford

Art Workers: Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice edited by Airi Triisberg, Erik Krikortz & Minna Henriksson

Art (world) & racism  by Howardena Pindell

Art Worlds  by Howard S. Becker

Artistic Labor Markets and Careers  by Pierre-Michel Menger

Artists in the Workforce: Employment and Earnings 1970-1990  by Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassail, Joan Jeffri and Robert Greenblatt, Ann O. Kay, Stephyn G. W. Butcher and Harry Hillman Chartrand 

Arts Workers in California  by the Urban Institute (Jenny R. Yang, Amanda Briggs, Jessica Shakesprere, Natalie Spievack, Shayne Spaulding, Steven Brown)

Capitalism and Disability  by Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra

Class, Race, and Marxism  by David R. Roediger

Code of Ethics for Museums  by the American Association of Museums

Crack Capitalism  by John Holloway

Cruel Optimism  by Lauren Berlant

Culture Incorporated  by Mark W. Rectanus

Debt: the First 5, 000 Years  by David Graeber 

Ethics And the Visual Arts  edited by Elaine A. King & Gail Levin 

Free Your Mind: A Speculative Review of #NewMoMA  by Claire Bishop and Nikki Columbus

GAAG: The Guerrilla Art Action Group, 1969-1976: A Selection  by Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks with Poppy Johnson

Harnessing the Means of Production  by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt 

Immaterial Labour  by Maurizio Lazzarato

International Art English  by Alix Rule & David Levine

Is A Museum A Factory?  by Hito Steyerl

Liquid Modernity  by Zygmunt Bauman

Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change  by Sharon Zukin with an introduction by David Harvey 

Made in Art School  by Lise Soskolne

Maintenance  by Anthony Terzino

Museum Highlights  by Andrea Fraser

Navigating Social Capital in Support of the Occupations: Some Advice for Institutions by Nato Thompson

New Institutionalism  edited by Jonas Ekeberg

NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate  by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant

Notes on the edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism  by George Caffentzis/Silvia Federici

On (Surplus) Value in Art  by Diedrich Diederichsen 

On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art  by Suhail Malik (video documentation of lecture series)

Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl  by Tiqqun and translated by Ariana Reines

Pricing Works of Art  by Ian Burn (The Fox, 1975)

Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics  edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno 

Researching Artists' Working Lives by Phyllida Shaw

Risk Society  by Ulrich Beck

Self-Organised  edited by Stine Hebert and Anne Szefer Karlsen

Size Matters  by Sarah Thelwall for Common Practice London

Studies of Artists: An Annotated Directory  by Donnell Butler, Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies

Tainted Love: Art's Ethos and Capitalization  by Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips

The Affective Turn: Theorizing The Social  edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley 

The Artist's Contract  by Maria Eichhorn

The Audit of Venus  by Alison Gerber

The Biennial Reader  edited by Marieke van Hal, Solveig Ovstebo, Elena Filipovic.

The Economics of Art and Culture  by James Heilbrun & Charles M. Gray

The Fine Art of Gentrification  by Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan 

The Immaterial  by Andre Gorz

The Irony of American History  by Reinhold Niebuhr

The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs  edited by Francis V. O’Connor 

The New Spirit of Capitalism  by Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello

The People's Cultural Plan  by The People's Cultural Plan

The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community  by Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James

The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community  by Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James

The Rich And The Rest Of Us: A Poverty Manifesto  by Tavis Smiley and Cornell West

The Undercommons  by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

There Is No Alternative: The Future is Self Organised  by Anthony Davies, Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen

This Work Isn't For Us  by Jemma Desai

Usus Pauper  by Howie Chen

Wages Against Artwork  by Leigh Claire La Berge

Wages Against Housework  by Silvia Federici

Wages For Facebook  by Laurel Ptak

Waging Culture: A Report on the Socio-Economic Status of Canadian Visual Artists  by Michael Maranda, The Art Gallery of York University

Whiteness as Property  by Cheryl I. Harris

Work, Work, Work: A Reader on Art and Labour  edited by Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Annika Enqvist, Michele Masucci, Lisa Rosendahl, Cecilia Widenheim

You Are Not A Gadget  by Jaron Lanier