functionless, hence it is at the limit of use-value. This gives art special properties. They are sensuous objects in which this sensuousness is their most explicit feature; they demand a certain attention from the viewer, so their consumption is also distinct, phenomenologically.

Most objects are a means to an end, but art is meant to objectively resist this purposive orientation. Whatever other intentions are there, you are meant to notice that it is an object before you, autonomous from your will, “looking back”.

In the post-conceptual era, we know that an art object doesn’t have to be a physical thing that endures in time. A minimal definition might be that it is a formal gesture, an action or record/consequence of an action that produces, alters, estranges or distorts a familiar form.

At the edge, we can say that any given art piece will implicitly force us to question what we are experiencing, inducing a sense of immediacy in our perceptions. Obviously most art is much more than this and often this aspect is implicit and only indirectly intended.

Now, I am speaking here of the limit case that grounds our concept of the art object, which only comes into its own in modernity as a dialectical other to the regular commodity. Many commodities are artful and involve aesthetic principles in their creation.

We could call this design. The way I think of this is not that design partakes in the special property of art - that it’s beautiful - but that art isolates the aesthetic as such, which is to say that all human gestures are purposive, or can be composed to be, and the special

property of art is to purify this. That most things we make involve aesthetic considerations is actually trivial; art objects pursue this in a form that emphasizes “design” to an extent degree. Marx has this quip about the real abstraction of value in the money form, that it is

as if alongside the lion and the bear, there is also the animal. Art is the practice of forcing this category of aesthetic intention that permeates absolutely everything we do to exist unto itself. The fact that this is impossible is no issue, because it generates formal

mediation that “works” anyway. The imperfectness of the abstraction, the self-conscious functionlessness, is what is compelling about it. No art object is simply Beauty, it is always many other things besides. Post-conceptual art makes this impossibility explicit,

in its formal studies of color, material, duration, figure, etc. Art is artifice as such. The separation between artistic activity and other activities is very old, but the generalization of commodity (fetish) production is a historical threshold for Art as

pure vocation to emerge. In turn, art inherently relativizes labor, something often explicit in the form of an art work but is implicit in any case. Labor too is only brought into being as a category of activity with the rise of capitalism. The emptiness of labor, in its ideal

form as repetition under really subsumed production, is the condition of possibility for the fullness of meaning and intention isolated in the artistic gesture. The aesthetic division of life between the dead time of work and that of leisurely consumption grounds this division.

But art expresses a particular social tension here. As I said, it is artifice as such, where the common and universal of life activity is made into a special case that, as such, subjectivities the object in a radical way unlike our typical use-values which are mere vehicles for

our intentions. Labor is not a static category, but the result of a process of subsumption, where the craft knowledge - which art practices implicitly refer to in a performance way - is first formally subsumed to produce value then iteratively really subsumed such that the

knowledge content of productive activity becomes a feature of the production process, embedded in the machine system and the process design, deskilling the laborer and reducing work to a sequence of repetitive gestures as inputs. The disembodied of craft is mirrored in the

concentration of craft in the artist, but cordoned off from the functional world of use-value production. In other words, in order for capital to continue valorizing, the tendency is the complete objectification of labor, where humans are tools possessed by an alien will.

The production of use-values is so desubjectivized that the actual material content of the use-values is increasingly detached from social need, as it is shaped by the competition over surplus value. As this develops, art becomes the social repository for all of that craft

activity, formally structured as social play. Whatever deeper social and spiritual value we ascribe to it, the production and reception of art is rendered as strict leisure, a matter removed from “life”. Or perhaps the essence of life, contrary work as dead time.

This ambiguity about the social status of art marks leisure generally. For capital, it comes in two basic forms: the off work time of labor-power, which does not valorize value but which is socially necessary; the luxury consumption of the bourgeois class, which is the subjective

motive for capitalists. The law of value restricts both: leisure for workers is normatively regulated to a minimum necessary so that it can be recovered as “productive consumption” - a process that reproduces labor-power but otherwise doesn’t enrich their lives; the need for

capital to expansively reproduce due to competition pushed the bourgeoisie to reinvest its profits and limit its consumption. These tendencies and divisions structure the whole sphere of leisure time. Some consequences of this are as follows: art is pressed into serving a social

function, and in staining a use-value, is commodified in various ways, often imperfectly. But the dominant mass cultural forms under capitalism are those most amenable to commodification. Painting may resist mass production, but films, games, image making in general do not.

The tendency to alienate craft and intentionality in labor does not only leave art as the realm where these find expression, it is just that this tendency is what art implicitly refers to, rather there are special skill categories where such techniques are retained and rationally

organized - design, marketing, etc - and certain industries that produce aesthetic experience to be consumed during leisure time. Commodities arrange our senses intentionally, just as any art work will do. There are some consequences to this.

As I said, all things we make involve aesthetic gestures. Art hypostasizes these as an end in itself. But the special category of commodities intended for leisure consumption is neither strictly art nor not art. Because the aesthetic impact tends to be really distinct:

entertainment passes the time, art pulls you out of time. Recall that Art, as I’m defining it, is heavily reified category, the social place where the act of artificing is formally isolated. The consequence of this, if successful, should be confounding, shocking, arresting,

rearranging, estranging the familiar and familiarizing the strange. While beautiful and pleasurable, perhaps even natural and “effortless”, the experience is that the art work has a kind of auratic power, the object is as if it was a subject, inducing a challenge and a process of

recognition not unlike meeting the face of another person. The way it self-consciously reports the mysteries of creative cognition in an active form that intervenes phenomenologically scrambles our senses. Lots of things do this not just art. But this is the point, what art

should do, normatively speaking, is reveal to us something more than itself, it should reveal the mediation that is the world, the fact that so much of life is just these moments of aesthetic shock. Art is purely formal, though historically contingent, any content can produce

this estrangement. This is to say, there’s no division between art and anything else, at the level of content, other than self-consciousness. Non-art works are consciously made a certain way; art works are self-consciously made a certain way as an emblem of this general process