Art and sex occupy similar positions under capitalism. The commodification of each, while rampant, is also rife with anxiety and subject to questions of ethics, purity, and meaning. This is because we are told art and sex shouldn’t be commodified. Both are seemingly sacred forms of human expression, and we are taught to keep them close to ourselves, safe from capital’s voracious appetite. And yet, art and sex– and specifically the art and sex industries–are actually capital’s stress points: two industries saturated in hyper-capitalist relations while also existing on the outskirts of the formal economy.
page 5, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex
