this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Use value is whatever the purchaser gets out of the commodity when they use it. Including looking at a painting they bought. Use value is therefore not restricted to purely utilitarian commodities. It even includes services, non-tangible commodities, etc.
Capitalism is about social relations to production. Art as a commodity is produced for sale. If you're employed by someone to make the art, they provide the supplies and keep the profits from sale, then you are a worker whose job is making art. Proletarian. If you buy your own supplies and do your own selling, you are petite bourgeois like any other owner proprietor. If you employ others to mske the art, e.g. a bunch of prints, you are moving towards a higher rung of bourgeois, moving from petite to just plain bourgeois. In all of these scenarios it does not matter whether the art is "subversive" or challenging, only your relation to its production as a commodity for sale.