Verdurin

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organisations an...

How can a library change the world? How can an art library change the art school or the gallery? Or even an art practice? In shelf documents , artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians reflect on how they can use the beloved library as a source of inspiration or a field of action. In thinking about diversity in collections, the publication proposes art libraries as sites of intersubject...

We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses. Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between this self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of soci...

Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded at-hoc in discrete, time- and output-bound chunks. This is the logic of projects. The workforce no longer...

The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to seemingly leaderless internet misinformation. Many of such events have been the subject of academic study -...

In conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequal ity has been supplanted by fast-evolving set of reflections of group identity. Mainstream politics makes fast and loose assumptions about the relationship between class and iden...

Through his blog K-Punk , Mark Fisher become one of the cult figures of cultural theory after the economic crash of 2008. One of Fisher's insights, widely taken up by the online memesphere, was that capitalism breeds depression. Mike Watson picks up Fisher's prognosis when the locked-down pandemic world is mired in a depression that is economic and psychological, and no doubt exacerbated by the tr...

In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Place or the oxycontin scandal have forced changes to the governance of some of the world’s best-known institutions. At the same time, the work of journalists and museum scholars has revealed that the relationships between trustees, curators, collections, and t...

For better or worse, artists write. But why would a visual artist write a novel? How should such a novel be experienced? How does the artist’s novel compare or compete with literary fiction as we know it? David Maroto, the author of The Artist’s Novel considers the proliferation of artists writing novels as a sign of the emergence of a new medium. Artists engaging in this new medium do so in order...

According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders , Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description. For many artists...

Killing for Show  Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq Julian Stallabrass Published by Rowman & Littlefield , 2020 ISBN 9781538141809 In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck that may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus t...

Medium Design  Knowing How to Work on the World Keller Easterling Published by Verso , 2020 ISBN 9781788739320 How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas, from climate change, to inequality, to concentrations of authoritarian power? Keller Easterling argues that the search for singular solutions is a mistake. Instead, she offers the perspect...

What Do Men Want?  Masculinity and Its Discontents Nina Power Published by Penguin/Allen Lane , 2022 ISBN 9780241356500 Something is definitely up with men. From millions online who engage with the manosphere to the #metoo backlash, from Men’s Rights activists and incels to spiralling suicide rates, it’s easy to see that, while men still rule the world, masculinity is in crisis. Feminism has...

The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality Grant Tavinor Published by Routledge , 2021 ISBN 9780367619251 When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the “real” world. Grant Tavinor...

A Philosophy of the Art School Michael Newall Published by Routledge , 2021 ISBN 9781032094342 If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between ‘you too are an artist’ and ‘abandon all hope you who enter here’ would be difficult. Despite significant changes in mainstream art education in recent decades, many anglophone art schools have not abandoned the principal tools...

The Play in the System The Art of Parasitical Resistance Anna Watkins Fisher Published by Duke University Press , 2021 ISBN 9781478009702 What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In  The Play in the System , Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for re...

Sociopolitical Aesthetics  Art, Crisis and Neoliberalism Kim Charnley Published by Bloomsbury , 2021 ISBN 9781350008748 Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions that are somewhere between art and politics. Kim Charnley’s Sociopolitical Aesthetics traces ke...

Communions Adam Lehrer Published by Hyperidean Press , 2021 ISBN 9781916376755 Artists from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse command fascination not only for their work but also for their drug addictions and the manner of their death. Communions is an attempt to understand the role that opiates play in the artistic lives of those who are gripped by addiction. Channeling hallucinated versions of dead a...

Investigative Aesthetics  Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth Matthew Fuller Eyal Weizman Published by Verso , 2021 ISBN 9781788739085 Today, journalists, legal professionals, activists, and artists challenge the state’s monopoly on investigation and the production of narratives of truth. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes, and technological domina...

Between Discipline and a Hard Place The Value of Contemporary Art Alana Jelinek Published by Bloomsbury , 2020 ISBN 9781350100473 Some fields have an easier time describing themselves than others. “History is the study of past events.” “Biology is the study of living organisms.” But art? Is art a discipline? Is it a practice? Who gets to answer this most fundamental of questions, and why do we pre...

Bound by Creativity How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged Hannah Wohl Published by University of Chicago Press , 2021 ISBN 9780226784694 What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Hannah Wohl speaks with Pierre d’Ala...

The Ends of Art Criticism Patricia Bickers Published by Lund Humphries , 2021 ISBN 9781848224261 Crisis? What Crisis? At a time where there are repeated claims of the impending demise of art criticism,  The Ends of Art Criticism   dispel these myths by arguing that the lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not, as some believe, a weakness, but a strength, allowing previously ma...

Art as an Interface of Law and Justice  Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption Frans-Willem Korsten Published by Hart , 2021 ISBN 9781509944347 Art as an Interface of Law and Justice looks at the way in which the ‘call for justice’ is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. Such calls may have their positive...

Speculation A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI Gayle Rogers Published by Columbia University Press , 2021 ISBN 9780231200219 In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetica...

Creating Spaces of Hope  Young Artists And The New Imagination In Egypt Caroline Seymour-Jorn Published by The American University in Cairo Press , 2021 ISBN 9789774169748 It is now just over a decade since protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square started Egypt’s chapter in the events of the Arab Spring. Much has been made in western criticism of art and culture’s role in the revolution, but the eve...