Capitalist realism was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 art movement of the early 1960s.

The phrase first appeared in the title of the 1963 art exhibition

Art exhibition

Art exhibitions are traditionally the space in which art objects meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is rarely true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" or...

 in Düsseldorf, Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, featuring the work of Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.- Biography :Gerhard Richter was born in...

, Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint...

, Wolf Vostell

Wolf Vostell

Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...

 and Konrad Lueg.

Capitalist realism can also be used to describe commodity-based art in general, from Pop Art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

 in the 1950s and 1960s to the commodity art of the 1980s and 1990s.

It is also the title of a book by Mark Fisher, an English philosopher and cultural critic. The full title is Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? Mark Fisher argues that capitalist realism best describes the current global political situation. His argument is a response to, and critique of, neoliberalism and new forms of government which apply the logic of capitalism and the market to all aspects of governance. As a philosophical concept capitalist realism is indebted to an Althusserian conception of ideology. As such, Fisher proposes that within the capitalist order there is no space to conceive of alternative forms of social structure.

Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions.
It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining
thought and action.

—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is there no alternative?