In Particular: Contemporary Art and Social Class

Set against the implementation of austerity in the late 2000s across Europe and the US, as well as the recent economic crises triggered by Covid and climate catastrophe, this project offers a new study into contemporary art and social class. Despite the urgent attention that is rightly being paid to different vectors of identification within the discourses of contemporary art – particularly the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race – social class remains a remarkable blind spot. This project therefore forges new directions of enquiry within Art History by analysing cutting-edge art works that confront the issue of social class, showing how questions of labour and work, belonging and exclusion, mobility and stasis, and culture and “taste” are central to both an analysis of social class and art. Here, the lens of the ‘particular’ both plays into and subverts historical constructions of “the masses” versus neoliberal concepts of “the individual”.