Everyone is Not an Artist: Autonomous Art Meets the Neoliberal City

The article makes a reading of how it is precisely through autonomous art’s universal exoneration of life (encapsulated by Joseph Beuy’s slogan ‘everyone an artist!’) that it becomes amenable to the opposite use: a propaganda tool for gentrification by which housing can be withdrawn and life rendered naked and exposed to the relentless forces of the market. In this way, the intricate and fundamental relationship between biopolitics and autonomous art is exposed.