As life of truth, beauty, and goodness appears beyond our reach, we may need to write a theory of ugliness before beauty can find its social function again.
Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. Kantian aesthetics makes a comeback.
The museum is the spiritual successor of the church. But if these institutions are historically entwined, so are their crises today.
Something has changed in the balance of politics and culture: the culture wars become culture itself.
What links art history, radical pedagogy, and Wagner? Adrian Rifkin’s Bildungsroman sets the Paris of 1968 against the practice of art history.
When everything is allowed and cancel culture has nothing to do with culture, what would it take for art to truly transgress?
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.
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.
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.
Art is the ultimate hustler: it will sidle up to anything which promises it access to experience, knowledge, or power. For evidence, one need only look at pairings between art and law, art and the environment, or art and business. How might we evaluate the limits of art’s claims to knowledge and the political potential…
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.
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.
The success of the Non-Fungible Token reveals a severe ‘speculative deficit’ haunting our culture. Its passing marks the urgent need for art to break its aesthetic limits.
Knee-jerk accusations of fascist thought and the refusal to embrace aesthetic ambiguity have meant that that ‘the left can’t meme’. It’s all Walter Benjamin’s fault – but artist like Joshua Citarealla and Monira Al Qadiri offer alternatives.
What are the distinctions between art, art activism, and traditional political activism? How can we reconstitute the political culture in a hyper-aestheticised world?
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…
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.
In the biennial, art could do all the things that we like to believe that art can do: deliver us from our concerns, transcend the limits of our imaginations, inspire us, give us hope. Art could do all those things. But often, it doesn’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology, and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art.
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.
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