Work s meaning both within art and in its wider economic and social context: the complexities of being an art worker in the new economy.
Warhol s Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism s assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers conditions in the 1970s—these are among the antecedents of a renewed focus on the work of art: labor as artistic activity, as artistic method and as object of artistic engagement. In 2002, the “Work Ethic exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth at the Baltimore Museum of Art took its cue from recent art to spotlight this earlier era of artistic practice in which activity became as valid as, and often dispensed with, object-production. Revealed through this prism was “dematerialized art s close and critical relation to the emergent information age s criteria of management, production and skill.