Post–Cold War capitalism’s claimed ideological victory is reframed as a crisis of valuation, where “economic value” and “actual worth” have long diverged and now collapse into view as global capitalism destabilizes from within. Art’s historically hybrid, exception-based economy—subsidized yet speculative, sustained by solidarities, gifts, commons, and piracy—becomes a model for alternative economies and strategies of autonomy amid austerity and the erosion of institutional support.

Maps the shift from oppositional, “outside” models of artistic resistance (punk negation, institutional critique, relational aesthetics) to an immanent condition where critique is structurally recuperated as branding, cultural capital, and “loss leader” value-production within neoliberal markets. Traces how artist-as-role, commodity-driven “aspirational aesthetics,” and K-HOLE’s trend-forecasting practice expose the conversion of sincerity, community, and even brand-inclusive art into affective labor and earned media, collapsing the boundary between cultural production and corporate strategy while leaving power networks intact.