Scientific Management and Conceptual Art: The Invention of the Artist Manager

This chapter examines the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century development of “scientific management” by Fredrick Winslow Taylor as a way of understanding the racial and colonial ideology of contemporaneous avant-garde art forms such as “found,” “readymade,” and the post-studio aesthetic practices afforded under their banner. The parallel popularity of scientific management and found object art in the twentieth century prompts consideration of how certain forms of labor become deskilled in both managerial studies and modern art. Through the examination of scientific management, the chapter analyzes how artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his critical champions have promulgated the scientific management approach to divisions of labor through the readymade, which they situated as a new and innovative form. This chapter seeks to critically expose hierarchies that are formed through divisions of labor in order to materialize the exploitation made abstract in capitalist and aesthetic forms.