I interview authors of new books in art, critical theory, creative industry studies, and philosophy.
You can listen to the shows here, in your podcast app, or find them alongside thousands of conversations covering a wide range of new academic writing in many disciplines on the New Books Network.
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Robert Janes: Museums and Societal Collapse
Museums could become the unlikely lifeboats of the impending societal and environmental collapse. But should they?
Toby Green, Thomas Fazi: The Covid Consensus
Evidence is mounting that ‘following the science’ was all politics and the horrific human and economic cost of pandemic policies necessitates a full inquiry into the making of the Covid consensus.
Aaron Moulton: The Influencing Machine
If a single NGO could take the credit for creating the cultural values of a whole region without once being called to account, what other ideologies is contemporary art producing and on whose orders?
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: Against Decolonisation
“The decolonisation hordes have taken over institutions.” Obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, they are attacking their own cause and harming scholarship on and in Africa.
Renzo Martens: Enjoy Poverty
What are the productive limits of art practice as critique? Renzo Martens’ ‘Enjoy Poverty’ is as relevant and as challenging as it was on its release.
Nina Power: What Do Men Want?
How can men and women live together well in a world where capitalism has replaced the values – family, religion, service, and honour – that used to give our lives meaning?
Benjamin Studebaker: Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies
Democracies don’t age gracefully.
Alfie Bown: Post-Comedy
What if we can’t take – or tell – a joke anymore?
Vid Simoniti: Artists Remake the World
Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. Kantian aesthetics makes a comeback.
Benjamin Studebaker: The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy
American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly making Americans poorer while it fuels bogus hope for change and stokes cultural conflicts.
Adrian Rifkin: Future Imperfect
What links art history, radical pedagogy, and Wagner? Adrian Rifkin’s Bildungsroman sets the Paris of 1968 against the practice of art history.
Samuel Redman: The Museum
Fires, floods, wars, and existential crises that have redefined what museums do and how they think of themselves and their public.
Sharon Hecker, Raffaele Bedarida: Curating Fascism
Curating Fascism examines the ways in which exhibitions organised after the fall of Mussolini’s regime to the present day have shaped collective memory, historical narratives, and political discourse around the Italian ventennio.
Craig Leonard: Uncommon Sense
In Uncommon Sense, Craig Leonard argues for the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic theory of Herbert Marcuse, an original member of the Frankfurt School and icon of the New Left.
Rhea Myers: Proof of Work
For all the popularity of Bored Apes and Ponzi scheme stories, there seems to have been little serious engagement with the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the blockchain.
David Houston Jones: Visual Culture and the Forensic
The more we are surrounded by images, the greater claims they make. Photographs are not only routinely used to convey news, they are used to establish what is and isn’t true.
Leila Jancovich, David Stevenson: Failures in Cultural Participation
For the past two decades, the arts and cultural establishment in the UK has been trying to engage a broader set of audiences in their work. But the dial on who participates and how much has not shifted, despite many thousands of projects trying to address the problem.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie: Beautiful, Gruesome, and True
Art has a long history of engaging with violence and contemporary artists often follow this tradition. Kaelan Wilson-Goldie tracks the contradictions inherent in the practice of aesthetics under the conditions of conflict.
Geert Lovink: Sad by Design
How do we conceptualise online ‘communities’. What are platform ‘ideologies’. And why is the internet making us so damn unhappy?
Peter Rehberg: Hipster Porn
The pink-papered magazine Butt gained a cult following among European gay men in the first decade of the 2000s. Peter Rehberg’s account reconstructs an important chapter of recent gay and queer history in order to make sense of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years in the contemporary queer world.
Gregory Sholette: The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art
What are the distinctions between art, art activism, and traditional political activism? How can we reconstitute the political culture in a hyper-aestheticised world?
Nicholas Gamso: Art After Liberalism
What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development can no longer be counted on to produce a world worth living in? These apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art…
Karen Archey: After Institutions
Can the museum serve the public if, as we are told, it abuses its staff? Can the art institution change the world if it’s unable to put its own house in order?
Heide Hinrich, et al: shelf documents
How can a library change the world? How can an art library change the art school or the gallery? Or even an art practice?
Mattin: Social Dissonance
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.
Kuba Szreder: The ABC of the Projectariat
The art world relies 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.
Joshua Citarella: Politigram and the Post-Left
If a researcher tracing the role of the meme to the politicisation and radicalisation of online communities struggles to keep up what hope does an artist have?
David Swift: The Identity Myth
“It’s not about race, it’s about class” is the fastest way to shut down a conversation on the progressive values. David Swift considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends.
Mike Watson: The Memeing of Mark Fisher
Capitalism breeds depression, suggested Mark Fisher. Mike Watson picks this prognosis when the locked-down pandemic world is mired in a depression that is economic and psychological, and no doubt exacerbated by the transfer of culture and life online.
Georgina Adam, Nizan Shaked: The problem with museums
Are contemporary art museums purely public affairs? How do private collections serve the greater good? What happens when these missions become confused? How should we account for the cost (in tax revenue, no least) of the philanthropist’s gesture?
David Maroto: The Artist’s Novel
Why do visual artists write novels? How should such a novel be experienced? How do artist’s novels compare or compete with literary fiction as we know it?
Abigail Susik: Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work
Surrealism produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real. For many artists, however, Surrealism took on an explicitly political and practical dimensions. Abigail Susik argues that many artists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work.
Julian Stallabrass: Killing for Show
Since the Vietnam War the way we see conflict – through film, photographs, and pixels – has had a powerful impact on the political fortunes of the campaign, and the way that war has been conducted.
Keller Easterling: Medium Design
How do we think in a world where ‘nothing works’? How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas, from climate change, to inequality, to concentrations of authoritarian power?
Grant Tavinor: The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality
When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they tend to do so through the lens of metaphysics. But to really account for VR, we must focus on the medium and its uses.
Michael Newall: A Philosophy of the Art School
Many contemporary art schools have not abandoned the principal tools of the masterclass or the crit that stem from some stubborn 18th-century ideas and the belief that creativity is the preserve of the artistic genius.
Anna Watkins Fisher: The Play in the System
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?
Kim Charnley: Sociopolitical Aesthetics
Sociopolitical Aesthetics argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between socially-engaged art and neoliberalism. Kim Charnley explores the possibility that neoliberalism has destabilized the art system so that it is no longer able to absorb and neutralize dissent. As a result, the relationship between aesthetics and politics is experienced with fresh urgency and militancy.
Adam Lehrer: Communions
Artists from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse command fascination not only for their work but also foe 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.
Fuller, Weizman: Investigative Aesthetics
Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology, and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art.
Alana Jelinek: Between Discipline and a Hard Place
“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 prefer not to try?
Hannah Wohl: Bound by Creativity
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.
Patricia Bickers: The Ends of Art Criticism
Crisis? What Crisis? The lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not a weakness, but a strength.
Frans-Willem Korsten: Art as an Interface of Law and Justice
Art, the law, and justice have had a long history together. But we shouldn’t see their relationship benign. Indeed art, with its ‘call for justice’ ca be ‘annoying’.
Gayle Rogers: Speculation
From the mirror and the watch tower, the scientific revolution, Jane Austen, to the shape of contemporary capitalism – with booms, manias, busts, and bubbles along the way.
Caroline Seymour-Jorn: Creating Spaces of Hope
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. How have artists responded personally and artistically to the political transformation?
Gemma Commane: Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies
What makes a woman ‘bad’ is commonly linked to certain ‘qualities’ or behaviours seen as morally or socially corrosive, dirty and disgusting. Gemma Commane speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about her study of neo-burlesque, queer performances, and explicit entertainment as sites of power, possibility, and success.
François Matarasso: A Restless Art
It is almost twenty years since contemporary art took a ‘participation turn’. How can we reconcile the somewhat forgotten history – and ongoing practice – of the community arts with the recent rise of participatory art, social practice, or outreach and engagement?
Jennifer Ponce de León: Another Aesthetics Is Possible
The activist performances of Grupo de Arte Callejero, Etcétera, and International Errorista rooted in the political histories of Latin America show how experimental practices in the visual arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist movements and popular uprisings.
Anthony Downey: Research/Practice
What forms of knowledge do artists produce in their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to generating research? Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems.
Danielle Child: Working Aesthetics
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 heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks.
Armstrong, Hughes: The Art of Experiment
In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. Hughes and Armstrong search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself.
Shannan Clark: The Making of the American Creative Class
In the middle of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralised in New York. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, and technicians made the culture that shaped the consumer economy. But this was far from a smoothly running machine.
Forkert, Oliveri, Bhattacharyya, Graham: How media and conflicts make migrants
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 challenges the idea of the ‘migrant’, pointing instead to the array of systems and processes that force this identity on individuals.
Jonas Staal: Propaganda Art in the 21st Century
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.
Leigh Claire La Berge: Wages Against Artwork
The last twenty years have seen a rise of new forms of socially engaged art aimed. Leigh Claire La Berge’s Wages Against Artwork addresses what she calls decommodified labor – the slow diminishment of wages – and the increasing presence of animals and children in contemporary art.
Tom Holert: Knowledge Beside Itself
What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Tom Holert’s Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.”
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