Description
Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of contemporary capitalism.
An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts's book defines and validates the avant-garde idea with an erudite acuity, providing a refined conceptual set of tools to engage critically with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.
Why the avant-garde of art needs to be rehabilitated today
About the Author
John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. His books includeThe Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, and The Necessity of Errors. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, Third Text, and Cabinet magazine.
Reviews
Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is without question the most informed, cogent, and intellectually grounded defence of avant-garde praxis today. Roberts provides a vision of art that is disabused of the business models of the neoliberal culture industries, that neither dissolves politics into art nor attempts to insulate art from functioning as an emancipatory revolutionary force. -- Marc James Leger, author of Brave New Avant Garde and The Neoliberal Undead
Over the last two decades, John Roberts has established himself as probably the most original Marxist critic of the contemporary visual arts around. -- Andrew Hemingway
Roberts's Intangibilities of Form is a truly important book. It offers an unusually thoughtful, and genuinely radical, alternative to dominant ways of understanding the nature of art in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. -- Alex Potts (in praise of The Intangibilities of Form)
The Intangibilities of Form proposes nothing less than a powerfully original labor theory of culture, highlighting the prominence of a context shaped by the readymade, to account for the constitutive interlacing of contemporary art and technology, skill, and deskilling. By situating the instance of conceptual art within an environment of production marked by the structuring logic of the commodity form and social division of labor, he has both restored to art criticism and art history a lost vocation, and delivered to cultural studies and its current explanatory ambitions a demanding challenge. -- Harry Harootunian (in praise of The Intangibilities of Form)
Simultaneously performs and advocates the conceptual terms through which [Roberts] understands a contemporary avant-garde program. * Red Wedge *
Book Information
ISBN 9781781689134
Author John Roberts
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 534g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 24mm
An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts's book defines and validates the avant-garde idea with an erudite acuity, providing a refined conceptual set of tools to engage critically with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.
Why the avant-garde of art needs to be rehabilitated today
About the Author
John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. His books includeThe Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, and The Necessity of Errors. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, Third Text, and Cabinet magazine.
Reviews
Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is without question the most informed, cogent, and intellectually grounded defence of avant-garde praxis today. Roberts provides a vision of art that is disabused of the business models of the neoliberal culture industries, that neither dissolves politics into art nor attempts to insulate art from functioning as an emancipatory revolutionary force. -- Marc James Leger, author of Brave New Avant Garde and The Neoliberal Undead
Over the last two decades, John Roberts has established himself as probably the most original Marxist critic of the contemporary visual arts around. -- Andrew Hemingway
Roberts's Intangibilities of Form is a truly important book. It offers an unusually thoughtful, and genuinely radical, alternative to dominant ways of understanding the nature of art in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. -- Alex Potts (in praise of The Intangibilities of Form)
The Intangibilities of Form proposes nothing less than a powerfully original labor theory of culture, highlighting the prominence of a context shaped by the readymade, to account for the constitutive interlacing of contemporary art and technology, skill, and deskilling. By situating the instance of conceptual art within an environment of production marked by the structuring logic of the commodity form and social division of labor, he has both restored to art criticism and art history a lost vocation, and delivered to cultural studies and its current explanatory ambitions a demanding challenge. -- Harry Harootunian (in praise of The Intangibilities of Form)
Simultaneously performs and advocates the conceptual terms through which [Roberts] understands a contemporary avant-garde program. * Red Wedge *
Book Information
ISBN 9781781689134
Author John Roberts
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Verso Books
Publisher Verso Books
Weight(grams) 534g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 24mm
