In the field of art, the central issues of #metoo are precisely linked to the normative notions of ‚proper‘ artistic subjectivity as a primarily masculine, upper or middle class, white subjectivity from the geopolitical and economic global ‚centers‘. The question – How to act as a ‚(self-)labelled woman‘ in the field of autonomous contemporary art? – opens up the present reflections to a broader critical interrogation of the ways in which artistic subjectivity and authority are established in the field of autonomous art. And what do they reveal about the functioning of society and the power dynamics within which the field of autonomous art is established? Following Tithi Bhattacharya, who asked: “If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?” (Bhattacharya, 2019: 1), the following text asks: If artists produce art, who then produces the artists, especially diasporic women artists, and how? Based on social reproduction and through the iconographic and media analysis of selected works by the artist Anna Ehreinstein (b. 1993, lives between Berlin, Germany and Tirana, Albania), the following text offers reflections on the (re)production of gendered artistic subjectivity through beauty work (as work on one’s own appearance) and as part of artistic labour. The paper follows the following analytical steps: it first locates the production of artistic subjectivity within the labour of art and then determines the work on the appearance of hyperfemininity as part of beauty work and as socially reproductive work that particularly feminized persons must invest in their appearance as a precondition for entering the sphere of productive (generally paid) work. The article looks at hyperfemininity in the artworks under discussion from the point of view of how it establishes itself in connection with globalized visual culture and reflects on its social roles.
