Sam Sackeroff is a PhD candidate and SSHRC doctoral fellow in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. During the 2014-2015 academic year he held a Mellon MRC Fellowship at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. His current research focuses on liberalism and aesthetics in postwar America.
Articles
Surplus Values: The Political Economy of Prints
Abstract. Beneath the churning apocalyptic surface of Planet Accelerate is there an unexplored reformist core? In this paper I argue the answer is “yes.” Focusing on Robert Rauschenberg’s printed works of the 1960’s, I explore that core, asking what a politically engaged aesthetic project premised on reform might look like. Making the most of Accelerationism’s permission to speak using capitalism’s own terms while troubling the movement’s more determinist tendencies, I show how accidents of capitalism can be seized interpretively to generate what I call “surplus values” which can then be leveraged in other areas of social and political life.