Study 26: The Missing Mass: Gregory Sholette’s 'Dark Matter' and the Political Economy of Post-Luxury Conceptual Functional Art

Why does modern luxury feel so hollow? We have diagnosed a "state of exhaustion," a system hollowed out by its own paradoxes, where price is detached from reality and meaning has been systematically stripped away. This study argues that this emptiness is a direct consequence of luxury's structural dependency on what theorist Gregory Sholette calls "artistic dark matter. "This is the vast, unacknowledged surplus of creative labor, the subcultures, activists, and community artists, that the mainstream simultaneously depends on and renders invisible.