It’s a dirty job, but someone’s always going to be doing it, and artists have always done it well. Cultural prostitution is a privilege of biopolitical control, one that enables those of us who qualify as a representational elite to broaden the horizons of our working conditions. Maybury describes herself as a political dominatrix. She isn’t “just” a sex worker – she’s a worker with an agenda, one in which the economic product of her labour is a means to justify and produce the conditions of her autonomy. Whether or not prostitution is the only way to reconcile the imposed difference between living and making a living might not be the essential question here. What’s being pointed to, rather, is capital’s inextricability from prostitution. By using her clients, whom she calls “submissives”, as unpaid studio assistants, Maybury turns the consumer into the product of work, a dual gesture that puts her labour-power in the service of value production but doesn’t enable her an escape from it.
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