In the avant-garde rhetoric internalized by contemporary art, the ideas of social involvement and artistic achievement are almost identical, claiming that after art’s self-sublation such involvement is art’s principal goal. Yet despite such internalization of avant-garde's socially-oriented legacy, already in the 1960s, the principal episteme and achievement of art became not the social involvement but the conceptual surplus. The negative antisocial and vicious genealogy, inherent in art since the early modernist practices, fostered various manipulations with this conceptual surplus that gradually so easily turned into a surplus-value – “the metaphysical index” of art’s economics, as D. Diedrichsen put it. Regardless of whether this surplus is an artistic cognitive gimmick, symbolic capital enhancing the cultural impact of an artwork, or a financialized abstraction simply increasing the cost of art, it functions as a hidden power of art in contemporaneity and is effectively disguised by art’s emancipatory good intentions.
