Christopher D’Arcangelo Speculates

This article examines Christopher D’Arcangelo’s so-called functional constructions, renovations he made to loft spaces in Manhattan, particularly around SoHo, in 1978 for friends in the art world. Upon completion, D’Arcangelo invited others to view the renovated space, along with the contract documents stipulating the costs of labor and materials, as his own artwork. By adapting industrial spaces into places for art and living, D’Arcangelo realized the utopian aspiration of the avant-garde to fuse art and life, only belatedly. Instead, the works gesture to a new conception of value premised not on the artwork’s commodity status or aesthetic autonomy but on its speculative capacity within a gentrifying postindustrial city. They thus occupy an overlooked historical space between the critical interrogation of modernist institutions and categories associated with art of the 1960s, and the subsumption of art by neoliberal capitalism.