Sex work can’t be represented, but it can be exchanged with representation, which is why it’s illegal to launder money but not work. In Maybury’s case, it takes a seriously proficient contemporary artist to integrate an academic career with the online performance required of a professional dominatrix; it takes a high-end sex worker to pay for, and run, a publishing house for experimental literature. That Maybury is able to claim these roles publicly, with the backing of both the art world and the university where she teaches, is itself evidence of the elite cultural strata the working artist occupies today.

The art market has always provided asylum for value, and also for people like us. Artists Micaela Carolan – with whom I have collaborated on various projects – and Leigh Ledare join Maybury as gatekeepers of the ethical and economic grey zone between conceptual practice and market ontologies. What we have in common is a willingness to exploit the bondage of capitalism with institutional consent.

Here, the art object is an external context – one of many chains that link value to its legitimacy. Carolan’s web-based project “The Chandelier Bid (2014)” (est. 2014) troubles the exhibition format with a series of e-commerce paywalls that may or may not function as installation art; Ledare and Maybury use more traditional forms of exploit: archive fetish, commodity dialectics.

The exhibition, when it is used, appears as the territorial strategy of a certain troubled estate. The dungeon provides Maybury and Carolan with a pre-existing marketplace; as a motif, it easily extends to Ledare’s prisonhouse of institutionally ringfenced desire.

Not only is there an economic precedent for prostitution as a reinvention of art, there’s rampant institutional sanction for it – the most prominent being Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), in which Fraser created an artwork out of a sexual encounter with an art collector who had paid to commission the work. The video documentation was then editioned and sold. It was a moment of unworkable conjecture under which the body of the white woman, as a pillar of morality, and the role of the artist, as a beaver of a cultural ethics, is realised within the sacrifice of exchange.