Santiago Sierra

Sierra's most well-known works involve hiring laborers to complete menial tasks. These works are meant to elucidate the nature of the laborer within capitalist society, how the laborer sells his physical labor and thus his body, political issues such as immigration and continual immigrant poverty in Capitalist countries, the nature of work in Capitalist society, and the isolation of economic classes. He achieves this through a number of techniques that present these themes and also question the nature of the art institution. While Sierra is critical of capitalism and the institutions which support it, he is also considered a successful artist. He seems to be aware of this contradiction when he says, “Self-criticism makes you feel morally superior, and I give high society and high culture the mechanisms to unload their morality and their guilt.”