Has the Art World Instrumentalized the Word “Activist”?

Courtesy VersoLauren O’Neill-Butler portrays the ten well-researched case studies that comprise her book on artistic activism, The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protests in America, as qualified successes. The working class late 1960s Women Artists in Revolution group, for example, had a formative influence on the more renowned Art Workers’ Coalition, though the former’s emphasis on women-only spaces at times risked becoming, in Adrienne Rich’s words, “an