In the middle of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralised in New York. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, and technicians made the culture that shaped the consumer economy. But this was far from a smoothly running machine.

The last twenty years have seen a rise of new forms of socially engaged art aimed. Leigh Claire La Berge’s Wages Against Artwork addresses what she calls decommodified labor – the slow diminishment of wages – and the increasing presence of animals and children in contemporary art.