Work
Work is one of the exhibition’s central thematic clusters. MoMA’s archives-highlights summary names “careers” as the mid-flow section following household life;1 the CNA education portal names “work” in its list of themes.2
Roland Barthes’s 1957 critique targets this section in particular: “what can be said about work, which the Exhibition places among great universal facts, putting it on the same plane as birth and death, as if it was quite evident that it belongs to the same realm of fate? That work is an age-old fact does not in the least prevent it from remaining a perfectly historical fact.”3 Any summary of this cluster that presents labor as a universal essence without acknowledging Barthes’s counter-reading reproduces the humanist framing he problematized.