This article looks at different forms of refusal and examines them as a practice that associates the artistic with the political from a historic and theoretical perspective. How did boycott, avoidance, and other gestures of nonparticipation become the most quintessential expressions of political art today? From what traditions do artists draw current manners of refusal? And how do these strategies of action relate to broader changes occurring in the political field and the world of work? The article attempts to carve a path between two common positions in the current discourse: one that sanctifies the separation between art and activism, which preserves the imagined purity of each one of the fields, and the other that sanctifies “political art,” for which any taking of an oppositional stand against the reality is a critical act. It does so by presenting two models of refusal in the area of art that developed in the late 1960s: the art strike of the Art Workers Coalition, and the “general” but individual strike that was initiated by artist Lee Lozano. These models are related to processes in the contemporary art world and are posed against turning points that characterize the art practice of the last decades, primarily the social turn in art and the dwindling of traditional political categories such as labor organizations. Out of a focus on the highly publicized campaign by the Decolonize This Place group, which led to the resignation of Warren Kanders from the Board of Directors of the Whitney Museum in New York in 2019, the article points to the critical potential as well as the limitations of each one of the models, and examines them in light of the growth of neoliberal subjectivity.