Is Art Fully Absorbed into Capitalism?

Can art exist outside capitalism, or is it merely capitalism’s most seductive disguise? This question surfaced after a conversation about whether life at all is possible outside capital’s grip, especially in the West. As someone working in the art world, my mind immediately raced to the question: Is art resisting, surviving, or simply serving capitalism?

In recent news, Pace Gallery, one of the most influential commercial art galleries, is reportedly in talks with Sotheby’s, the leading titan of the auction world, to form a partnership that could considerably reshape the art market. It is not clear if the deal would take the shape of an investment, merger or acquisition, but it is rumoured to be a “joint venture between Pace and Sotheby’s that will be multifaceted and has many elements. Let’s call it a ‘new model’.” As the art market has hit a slow period, with an unstable economic and political situation, cultural places have to find new ways to stay afloat and fund their operations. But the question is, is there a line between what is an acceptable form of funding and what constitutes a sellout?

Warren Kanders, former vice chairman of the Whitney Museum’s board, was funding exhibitions through money from his company, Safariland, which manufactured tear gas canisters used against immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The Sackler family donated millions to museums like the Met and the Tate, funding entire wings and programs while simultaneously fuelling the opioid crisis in the U.S. through their company, Purdue Pharma. For decades, the Sackler name was synonymous with high culture and philanthropy, until artists and activists such as Nan Goldin and the group P.A.I.N. forced institutions to reckon with the blood money behind their white walls.

These cases are not anomalies, they're systemic. They show how art institutions have become complicit in softening the image of violent or exploitative wealth. It’s not just that art is absorbed into capitalism; it’s that capitalism absorbs art as part of its own survival strategy. Has art fully merged with capital, or has it simply become more sophisticated at disguising its entanglement?

The relationship of art to capital is longstanding and crucial, from art patrons like the Medici to contemporary art fairs, art has served as both a cultural and financial capital. But as Theodore Adorno argued, capitalism reduces cultural production to standardised, homogenised, commodified forms engineered for profit and with a goal to minimise critical engagement. In turn, art loses its autonomy; it becomes a product, whose value is determined by its exchangeability. That leads to the loss of art’s potential to engage, provoke thought and resist conformity. His warning is more current than ever, with artworks being increasingly optimised for market success, exhibitions are curated and designed to do well on social media, and choices as to the pieces shown are becoming more and more often predetermined by their Instagrammability and ability to be eye-catching in our attention economy.

The systems we aim to critique have learned the patterns of protest and absorbed them into their operations. Activist aesthetics are commissioned by institutions they sought to disrupt, with radical gestures being turned into brand identities. Slogans such as “Smash the patriarchy” or “Eat the rich” are now silk-screened onto luxury streetwear and sold in museum gift shops or fashion houses. Dior’s $710 “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt, lifted from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay, took a feminist rallying cry and repackaged it as haute couture marketed to elites, and sold within an industry infamous for its gendered labour exploitation. A year later, the same fashion house came out with a long-sleeve shirt with the question ‘Why have there been no great women artists?” printed on it, this time lifted from Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay on the lack of women artists in the historical art canon. Art that critiques commodification becomes commodified itself. The issue is not with the lack of resistance, but with the fact that it has become fully integrated, and it feeds the system. Institutions have learned how to monetise glitches. What once looked like rebellion may now be just another product in capitalism’s expanding catalogue of simulated transgressions.

Even institutional critique itself can be pre-commodified, folded back into the market, and rebranded as both radical and profitable. So I’m left wondering, can an artist truly critique the system when the system has already absorbed critique into its functioning?

Andrea Fraser takes Adorno’s concerns one step further, turning the critique inward. In L’1%, C’est Moi (2012), she exposes the uncomfortable reality that the very critique of capitalism in art is often bankrolled by the same elite structures it targets. The piece is a data-driven performance-essay that reveals how many collectors of “critical” art are members of the world’s financial and political elite, the 1% who benefit most from the systems being critiqued. Fraser doesn’t position herself as separate from this machine; instead, she implicates herself. She acknowledges that her work, however politically charged, is funded by and made legible through the very institutions she interrogates. The title itself is a play on Louis XIV’s “L’état, c’est moi,” signalling that the contemporary artist is not a revolutionary figure outside the system, but a symbolic extension of power within it. This is not critique as rebellion, but critique as complicity, as a weaponised introspection that challenges the idea of institutional critique as a moral high ground.

Andrea Fraser, a central figure in the tradition of institutional critique, writes: “Now, when we need it most, institutional critique is dead, a victim of its success or failure, swallowed up by the institution it stood against.” It’s a sobering diagnosis of the current state of critical art, where the once-subversive gesture has become an institutional asset, a credential rather than a challenge.

But Fraser doesn’t stop at critique, she shifts the responsibility inward. “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.” In doing so, she reframes critique as not merely oppositional, but as a call to reshape the very structures we inhabit, because complicity isn’t optional; it’s the starting point.

Fraser argues that even when you’re against the system, you play into its structure and fuel it further, a kind of inescapable vicious circle. Hito Steyerl furthers that entanglement by saying that you don’t have to be producing art or doing anything to be a commodity. Your visibility in itself is monetised, tracked and extracted - a new type of currency. In her work How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, she presents a survival guide for remaining invisible in an age of hyper-surveillance and a media-saturated reality. Steyerl suggests that the way to escape is invisibility, once a form of exclusion, can now be a form of resistance or a refusal to participate. However, even invisibility has become a luxury, available to those with resources to opt out. Remaining unseen can mean remaining unsellable, and in a market that trades not only in objects but in attention, that’s a risk many institutions are unwilling to take. Where Fraser implicates herself in the mechanisms of elite patronage, Steyerl maps a landscape where images don’t just circulate, but they’re harvested. Each visual, no matter how subversive, is swiftly converted into value.

The financialisation of art has intensified to the point where aesthetic value is often indistinguishable from market value. The Pace–Sotheby’s partnership speculations exemplify this shift, blurring the line between gallery and auction house and signalling art’s firm position within the logic of financial assets. Art is increasingly treated as a speculative commodity, traded in art funds, held as investment vehicles, and leveraged as status symbols. NFTs epitomise this convergence of art and capital: once hailed as democratising tools, they now function primarily as hyper-commercialised brand assets, with even conceptual pioneers like Marina Abramović entering the crypto-art market. Widely recognised as a trailblazer of performance art, Abramović has launched NFTs and interactive digital experiences marketed as spiritual or immersive journeys, effectively transforming ephemeral performance into tradeable products. One is left to wonder, if even the most formerly radical artists are adapting to these models, is the only way to survive them to join them? Should artists define and defend lines they will not cross, or, in an economy increasingly hostile to precarity, has commercial viability become a necessary condition of artistic survival? The rise of the “artist-entrepreneur” underscores this dilemma, with the language of artistic freedom now colonised by startup culture, where “innovation,” “disruption,” and “vision” displace critique, autonomy, and resistance. In this new regime, artists are no longer just cultural producers, but brand architects and speculative assets within a fully financialised art ecology.

Andrea Fraser, The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram

Of course, to paint the entire art world with the brush of financialisation would be to ignore the ecosystems that operate outside, or in conscious defiance, of its logic. Across cities and rural regions alike, there are community-based collectives, DIY curatorial practices, artist-run spaces, and mutual aid networks that prioritise collaboration over capital, and care over commodification. These initiatives often function without institutional support, driven by shared values rather than market viability. From informal exhibitions in squats and repurposed buildings to decentralised online platforms that bypass galleries altogether, many artists continue to engage in practices rooted in accessibility, political urgency, and cultural solidarity. However, such initiatives tend to remain structurally marginalised. They are rarely covered by mainstream media, excluded from blue-chip galleries and high-profile art fairs, and typically operate on minimal funding. Their marginal status underscores the very problem they resist: that visibility and sustainability in the art world are still largely determined by proximity to capital. The tension, then, is not between participation and refusal, but between visibility and sustainability: how can art that resists commodification survive in a system where survival itself is increasingly tethered to market logic?