Verdurin

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...

Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity Gemma Commane Published by Bloomsbury , 2021 ISBN 9781788311267 What makes a woman ‘bad’ is commonly linked to certain ‘qualities’ or behaviours seen as morally or socially corrosive, dirty and disgusting.  Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies  explores the social, sexual and political significance of women who are labelled bad or dirty. Th...

A Restless Art  How participation won, and why it matters François Matarasso Published by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation ( open access ), 2019 ISBN 978­1­903080­20­7 It is almost twenty years since contemporary art took a ‘participation turn’.  Now,  just about every museum or theatre company has a participation or engagement department. It is nothing short of orthodoxy that on...

Another Aesthetics Is Possible Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War Jennifer Ponce de León Published by Duke University Press , 2021 ISBN   9781478011255 In  Another Aesthetics Is Possible  Jennifer Ponce de León examines the roles that art can play in the collective labour of creating and defending another social reality. Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, M...

Research/Practice edited by Anthony Downey I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze / Michael Rakowitz The General’s Stork / Heba Y. AminRachel Armstrong Published by  Sternberg Press , 2019, 2020 ISBN 9783956794766, 9783956794780 In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s  The General’s Stork ,...

Working Aesthetics Danielle Child Published by Bloomsbury , 2019 ISBN 9781350022393 Working Aesthetics  is the story of art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic but is...

The Art of Experiment  Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century Architecture and Design Rolf Hughes Rachel Armstrong Published by Routledge , 2021 ISBN 9781138479579 The Art of Experiment is a handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times. In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across ti...

The Making of the American Creative Class Shannan Clark Published by Oxford University Press , 2020 ISBN 9780199731626 During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secret...

How media and conflicts make migrants Kirsten Forkert Federico Oliveri Gargi Bhattacharyya Janna Graham Published by Manchester University Press , 2020 ISBN 9781526138118 Has ‘migrant’ become an unshakeable identity for some people? How does this happen and what role does the media play in classifying individuals as ‘migrants’ rather than people?  How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants  c...

Propaganda Art in the 21st Century Jonas Staal Published by MIT Press , 2019 ISBN 9780262042802 How to understand propaganda art in the post-truth era — and how to create a new kind of emancipatory propaganda art. Propaganda art—whether a depiction of joyous workers in the style of socialist realism or a film directed by Steve Bannon — delivers a message. But, as Jonas Staal argues, propagand...

Wages Against Artwork Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art Leigh Claire La Berge Published by Duke University Press , 2019 ISBN 9781478004233 The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. Leigh Claire La Berge, author of  Wages Against Artw...

Knowledge Beside Itself Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics Tom Holert Published by Sternberg Press , 2020 ISBN 9783943365979 What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research”...