What is art’s standard claim to the political? ‘Art’ is a general term used in contemporary culture that, firstly, designates the images it produces as a correlate of the real, a real that is supposedly free from law and that embodies uncertainty, contingency and flux. At the same time, this claim to the real is reliant upon the nature of the images that art produces; upon their occupying a particular space that manifests the innate and essential character of freedom. On account of this condition of image-reality, art has come to symbolize an image of freedom from law, a prepolitical state of infinite and dynamic uncertainty, openness and flux; yet at the same time, art has tasked itself with the labour of achieving freedom, in the project of social emancipation…