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History, Use Value, and the Contemporary Work or Labour of Art examines the relationships between our current conception of contemporary art practice as work or labour and situates this within a historical discourse of work or labour as Use Value (re-Marx, Das Kapital, vol.1, 1867) or, more specifically, the idea that art, as a form of non-alienated labour, can act as both an aesthetic and ethical rebuff to the physical and mental alienation and fractalization of insturmentalized labour under our present conditions of neo-liberal globalization. As such the essay seeks to re—examine the relationship of aesthetics to politics in Rancière's notion of a 'meta-politics of aesthetics' and to offer alternative ways of thinking through and beyond this binarism through a re-reading of ethical labour in Marx and Hegel's proposition of the 'Unhappy Consciousness' in 'The Phenomenology of Sprit' (1807). The book What's the Use? Consteallations of Art, History, and Knowledge: A Critical Reader, also contains articles by international writers John Ruskin, Adrian Rifkin, Georges Didi-Huberman, George Yúdice and artists Tania Bruguera and Liam Gillick.