Staff Picks

"9.5 Theses on Art and Class and Other Writings seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art to the troubled status of "outsider" and street art to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself"--Publisher's description

Art, Engagement, Economy: the Working Practice of Caroline Woolard' proposes a politics of transparent production in the arts, whereby heated negotiations and mundane budgets are presented alongside documentation of finished gallery installations. Readers follow the behind-the-scenes work that is required to produce interdisciplinary art projects, from a commission at MoMA to a self-organized, international barter network with over 20,000 participants. With contextual analysis of the political economy of the arts, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID pandemic of 2020, this book suggests that artists can bring studio-based sculptural techniques to an approach to art-making that emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue.

"The idea of the autonomy of the art object seems to have disappeared into the annals of modernism. Today our primary concern is to show how art and its institutions are socially determined, that art no longer operates in a separate sphere of its own. Sven Lütticken’s ambitious study seeks to test such assumptions, arguing that the concept of autonomy retains its conceptual and political purchase. Bringing together a wide range of thinkers (from Theodor W. Adorno to Aimé Césaire, Friedrich Schiller to Andrea Fraser, Peter Bürger to Elizabeth Povinelli) and covering a broad set of themes (from German Idealism to institutional history and media theory), this critical reader foregrounds autonomy as something dynamic, offering an essential introduction to the field while leading the debates in fresh directions."-- vendor website, viewed March 21, 2023.

A new model of action to invent new modes of art production and exchange by establishing a direct dialogue between the artist, the citizen-commissioner and the cultural mediator, outside the museum and apart from the art market.
Keeping capitalism out of the game while works and their contexts are reinvented: this book is about the possibility of a new chapter in the history of art, in which the “public” allows itself to become a patron of the arts, and people from all walks of life begin to speak the raison d'être of art works. Artists are faced with undreamed of situations in which the mediators of contemporary art play an avant-garde role. Responsibility for the common good is shared between citizens and their elected representatives, while a “gift economy” (public grants and private donations) provides the means to engage freely in a new adventure: the advent of an “art of democracy”.--publisher's description

This groundbreaking book, accompanying a major exhibition at the Hirshhorn, tells the story of the evolution of New York's downtown art scene in the 1980s from a DIY counterculture in the East Village to a legitimate gallery business in SoHo. Coinciding with the rise of modern branding and the onset of the information age, artists' focus on commodities and consumerism began as satire but came to be much more complex: commodities and associated phenomena, such as advertising, now served as vessels for ideas, politics, and personal relationships in 'brand-new' types of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance. In a book full of visual surprises, newly commissioned essays shed new light on this pivotal period: curator Gianni Jetzer provides a comprehensive overview, while Leah Pires illuminates lesser-known conceptual collaborations, and Bob Nickas offers an eyewitness account of the East Village gallery scene. These texts, together with an illustrated chronology, provide a fresh account of the moment at which contemporary artists such as Felix González-Torres, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman grabbed the ball from Andy Warhol and ran with it, changing the rules of the game forever.--publisher's description

Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios maps and analyzes the complex and contested entanglements of contemporary art and its commercial markets. Contemporary art as an asset category and celebrity accessory, the rise of the art fair, and the increased competition of auction houses are among the phenomena which are discussed by academics, theoreticians, and artists. While some of the contributions show how the market’s globalization and commercialization both reflect and propel the way art is produced, presented, and perceived, others downplay the impact of these developments and argue that the market’s structure has essentially remained the same. All the essays trigger the question, what will art look like in 2022, and how will artists operate?--publisher's description

How do we move beyond austerity and the colonization of creativity? Today, when it seems like everything has been privatized, when austerity is too often seen as an economic or political problem that can be solved through better policy and when the idea of moral values has been commandeered by the Right, how can we re-imagine the forces used as weapons against community, solidarity, ecology and life itself? In this stirring call to arms, Max Haiven argues that capitalism has colonized how we all imagine and express what is valuable. Looking at the decline of the public sphere, the corporatization of education, the privatization of creativity and the power of finance capital in opposition to the power of the imagination and the growth of contemporary social movements, Haiven provides a powerful argument for creating an anti-capitalist commons. Not only is capitalism a crisis itself, but moving beyond it is the only key to survival.--publisher's description

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today’s soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions. In the creative city, the neutralization or incorporation of subcultural movements, the organic translation of the gritty into the quaint, and the professionalization of the artist combine with armies of eager freelancers and interns to constitute the friendly user interface of a new social sphere in which, for those who have been granted a place within it, an elaborate retooling of traditional markers of difference has allowed class distinctions to be either utterly dissolved or willfully suppressed. The result is a handful of cities selected for revitalization rather than desertion, where artists in search of cheap rent become the avant-garde pioneers of gentrification, and one no longer asks where all of this came from and how. And it may be for this reason that, for Rosler, it becomes all the more necessary to locate the functioning of power within this new urban paradigm, to find a position from which to make it accountable to something other than its own logic.--publisher's description

Curating has evolved into much more than creating interesting exhibitions, promoting artists, and caring for artworks: in this millennium, art and business are fused, transforming capitalism from the inside out. Curating Capitalism implies new ways of management far beyond the simple commercialization of art and artist. Today, art and the artist inspire business. Beginning with Joseph Beuys’s declaration ART = CAPITAL and Andy Warhol's vision of a capitalistic BUSINESS ART, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux contemplates the insights of contemporary curators to understand the new hybrid forms of art and business active in our current society and economy.--publisher's description

Capitalist crisis do not begin within art, but art reflects and even amplifies their effects. The dizzying prices achieved by artists who pander to the financial elites, the proliferation of museums that contribute to the global competition between cities to attract capital, and the strange relationship between art and the rampant gentrification that restructures the urban landscape: these are the obvious features of art's subservience to capitalism. There is a flipside, however, which shows art playing an increasingly important role in resistance to austerity and the prefiguration of a different world. Delirium and Resistance engages in critical dialogue with artists' collectives, counter-institutions and activist groups, while reflecting on the inequalities of neoliberal culture. It draws on over thirty years of critical debates and practices both in and beyond the art world to historicise and advocate for the art activist tradition that radically entangles the visual arts with political struggles.

It's the Political Economy, Stupid brings together internationally acclaimed artists and thinkers, including Slavoj Žižek, David Graeber, Judith Butler and Brian Holmes, to focus on the current economic crisis in a sustained and critical manner.
Following a unique format, images and text are integrated in a visually stunning bespoke production by activist designer Noel Douglas. What emerges is a powerful critique of the current capitalist crisis through an analytical and theoretical response and an aesthetic-cultural rejoinder. By combining artistic responses with the analysis of leading radical theorists, the book expands the boundaries of critique beyond the usual discourse.
It's the Political Economy, Stupid argues that it is time to push back against the dictates of the capitalist logic and, by use of both theoretical and artistic means, launch a rescue of the very notion of the social.--publisher's description

"Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality reconsiders periods of economic and social collapse through the lens of artistic innovations and material-driven narratives. It examines five art scenes generated during heightened periods of upheaval: America's Detroit from the 1967 rebellion to the present; the cultural climate of the Italian avant-garde during the 1960s-1980s; authoritarian-ruled South Korea of the 1970s; Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s to the present; and contemporary Greece since the financial crisis of 2009. Featuring more than sixty artists, Landlord Colors is a landmark exhibition, publication, and public art and performance series. While the project unearths microhistories and vernaculars specific to place, it also examines a powerful global dialogue communicated through materiality. Landlord Colors discovers textured and unexpected relationships between these artists whose investigations share themes of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and resistance."--Cranbrook Art Museum website.

"In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Aesthetics and the Financialisation of the Subject, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno's negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorization of capital's drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected"--publisher's description

"Undoing Property? examines complex relationships inside art, culture, political economy, immaterial production, and the public realm today. In its pages artists and theorists address aspects of computing, curating, economy, ecology, gentrification, music, publishing, piracy, and much more."--publisher's description

Since the mid-1980s, the once marginal city of Vancouver has developed within a globalized economy and become an internationally recognized centre for contemporary visual art. Vancouver's status is due not only to a thriving worldwide cultural community that has turned to examine the so-called periphery, but to the city's growth, its artists, expanding institutions, and a strong history of introspection and critical assessment. As a result, Vancouver art is visible and often understood as distinct and definable.
This anthology intends to complicate the notion of definability. It offers nine essays to address the organized systems that have affected contemporary art in Vancouver over the last two decades. The essays in Vancouver Art & Economies collectively remark, both compatibly and contradictorily, on the economies at work in Vancouver art--its historical, critical, and political engagement; its sites of cultural production; and its theoretical and practical intersection with technology or policy. Considering a selection of conditions, focuses, and resources within the community, Vancouver Art & Economies marks shifting ideologies and perspectives on art, politics, society, and capital in Vancouver.--publisher's description

Working Aesthetics is about the relationship between 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 heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks. As work and life become obscured within the contemporary period, this book asks how artistic practice is affected, including those who labour for artists. Through a series of case studies, Working Aesthetics critically examines the moments in which labour and art intersect under capitalism. When did labour disappear from art production, or accounts of art history? Can we consider the dematerialization of art in the 1960s in relation to the deskilling of work? And how has neoliberal management theory adopting the artist as model worker affected artistic practices in the 21st century?