The talk will hinge on how it comes to matter how the terms in the art and work conversation are defined, and what relationships are mapped between them. If nothing is self-evident about art, including its ‘right to exist’ (Adorno), the same goes for work, including artistic labour. This talk will thus try to set forward some possibilities of definition, for the political strategies and ontological worlds they can enable. In counter to a positivist politics of work, the speculative force of the transversality of work in art and the possibilities of ‘unworking’ art itself are at issue.