[...] Art objects critical of their own status as assets are still assets. Contemporary art has shaped the world like any other market. Freeport art storage is just a new take on the Swiss bank, housing millions of artworks in tax-free and mostly extraterritorial storage zones. In “If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!” and “Is Art a Currency?” Steyerl argues that art is an alternative currency, “a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value,” and that its industries “trigger trickle-up effects which are then flushed sideways into tax havens.” But it is not a common currency available to all. As Steyerl writes, “Contemporary art is just a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality.”

Artists will admit their complicity with the market. But they often do so under the aegis of sleek facades that turn in on themselves