Therese Kaufmann’s argument proposes that contemporary art cannot be understood as an autonomous sphere, but rather as an ambivalent zone in which aesthetic production, academic formation and the knowledge economy are structurally entangled within cognitive capitalism. Her initial intervention shifts the question from “what does art produce?” to “which regime of knowledge legitimates that production?”, revealing creativity, artistic research and higher education as simultaneous sites of neoliberal valorisation and potential resistance. This tension becomes sharper when the art academy, far from standing outside the market, participates in apparatuses of control, modularisation, excellence and precarity, while still preserving fissures for critical indiscipline. Artistic research is exemplary here: what once emerged, in certain genealogies, as insurgent self-education—as in the 1968 student struggles at Hornsey College of Art—may be transformed into curricular accreditation, intellectual commodity or laboratory for new modes of thought. Kaufmann then introduces the decisive lens of the coloniality of knowledge, showing how Western canons, labour hierarchies and creative economies reproduce racialised, gendered and geopolitical exclusions. Thus, “world-making” names not only art’s capacity to imagine alternatives, but also the historical violence through which European modernity fabricated its others. The conclusion is exacting: art becomes politically generative only when it disorganises inherited epistemic machines and opens spaces of thought capable of contesting which worlds deserve to exist.