The development of industrial capitalism led to a reconfiguration of the social function of culture. A commodification of Western culture and fetishisation of art emerged that was inseparable from the expansion of this world system. This historical process consolidated insofar as it produced a series of material and imaginary rifts between interconnected spheres. In this article we analyse the way in which these rifts operated within aesthetics, economics and ecology, positing an eco-Marxist critique of the exhibition space and its associated social experience. Our analysis focuses first on the dawn of industrial modernity, highlighting the colonial and imperial matrix of this Eurocentric project. Secondly, the article underscores how contemporary art and the Great Acceleration of the ecosocial crisis are linked due to an exponential increase in the infrastructures of cultural industries. By exploring these connections, we show how the spatiality of contemporary art is linked to the dynamics that characterise the political, economic and cultural global system, interacting with the accumulation of ecosocial crises in which we are immersed.

This article is part of the research projects ‘Estética Fósil: una ecología política de la historia del arte, la cultura visual y los imaginarios culturales de la modernidad' (Fossil Aesthetics. A Political Ecology of Art History, Visual Culture and Cultural Imaginaries of Modernity, PIE, ref 202010E005) at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council, CSIC), and ‘Cinema, Capitalist Modernity and the Ecosocial Crises of the Anthropocene’, at Aalto University and funded by the Research Council of Finland. The research has also been funded by Jaime Vindel's Ramón y Cajal Fellowship (RYC2018-024943-I) and by the research projects PID2019-109252RB-I00, PID2019-107757-RB-100 and PID2020-113272RA-I00, financed by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and “FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa”

Peer reviewed