Art has been an umbrella term for poetry; music, dance, sculpture painting, and architecture since the end of the eighteenth century, when the bourgeoisie were establishing their hegemony over culture and politics in Germany, labor was becoming more clearly divided, and religion was losing its unifying force. Art became a broad and separate entity as the expectations and experience of it changed. The Institutions of Art concentrates on German and French literature in illustrating the formation of aesthetic autonomy and the divergence between high and popular culture. Peter B_rger builds on his earlier Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), pushing further into key theoretical questions about art and society. Christa B_rger extends the critique to the history of the novel, focusing on Goethe and Kleist. Looking backward to feudalism and forward to our century, the authors show how the function of art has changed along with the criteria for its production and evaluation.

This multi-author text provides in-depth analyses of space ethics and approaches to governance on territories beyond Earth. With insights from a vast background of academic subjects including science, law, philosophy, psychology, and politics it presents a holistic take on the expression of space freedoms and what it might mean for humankind.

A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of art's complex relationship to power. Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought before the public in two ways—as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function. Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today's mainstream Western art—which he finds behaving more and more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself—by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of the modern artwork.

This book focuses on the phenomenon of art intervention—an expression of local initiatives by artists, collectives, and art centers wishing to influence the design of the space or make a change in its lifestyle. It pertains not only to acts of protest, but also to the creation of a new civil and political situation in which artists acknowledge their ability to constitute foci of power. These are reflected in acts such as squatting in abandoned buildings, restoring and redistributing them according to principles of social justice; mapping the city based on alternative parameters, such as revealing venues of collective memory or exposing the city's backyard; creating outdoor urban art galleries; and creating temporary architecture and alternative solutions in order to deal with the challenges we face in times of epidemic and environmental crisis. The art intervention phenomenon has intensified since the mid-1990s, so much so that even local authorities the world over have begun to adopt activist and artistic practices. Due to the intensive urbanization processes and current global threats, the creative trends and means surveyed in the book are crucial. This book will interest researchers, planners, urban planners, architects, social activists, local authority executives, art centers, artists, and designers.

Alberto Cossu's ethnographic research on the MACAO centre in Italy radiates out to questions about what it means to be a modern artist, and how much autonomy is left to the artist in a globalized and politicised world. "Autonomous Art Institutions" provides a unique perspective on the political engagement of artists in order to investigate the reconfiguration of contemporary art practices as they dissolve in social and economic processes. The book provides insight into the making of a radical art institution across seven years of activity, showing how social, cultural and economic elements are appropriated and repurposed by artists in the process. Based on years of sociological research as well as direct involvement of the author in the artistic practices, the book illuminates the spark of society-to-come by examining the doings of artists as they attempt to disrupt the ‘creative city’.

Every politics is an aesthetic. If necropolitics is the (accelerated) politics of what is usually referred to as the ‘apolitical age’, what are its manoeuvres, temporalities, intensities, textures, and tipping points? Bypassing revelatory and reconstructionist approaches – the tendency of which is to show that a particular site or practice is necropolitical by bringing its genealogy into evidence – this collection of essays by artist-philosophers and theorist curators articulates the pre-perceptual working of necropolitics through a focus on the senses, assignments of energy, attitudes, cognitive processes, and discursive frameworks. Drawing on different yet complementary methodologies (visual, performance, affect, and network analysis; historiography and ethnography), the contributors analyse cultural fetishes, taboos, sensorial and relational processes anchored in everyday practices, or cued by specific artworks. By mapping the necropolitics’ affective cartography, they expand the concept beyond its teleological, anthropocentric, and reductive horizon of ‘making and letting die’ to include posthuman and posthumous actants, effectively arguing for the necropolitics’ transformatory, political potential.

The ABC of the projectariat contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in the field of contemporary art. It works as both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide. In an accessible ABC format, the book strikes a unique balance between the practical and the theoretical: the analysis is backed up by lived experience, the arguments are rooted in concrete examples and there are suggestions for constructive action. Roughly half of the entries expose the structural underpinnings of projects and circulation, isolating traits such as opportunism, neoliberalism, inequality, fear and cynicism at the root of the condition of the projectariat. This discussion is paired with a practical account of different modes of action, such as art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines. Just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought a massive change in every domain of life, particularly in the cultural sector, where artists were suddenly "free" from party-mandated modes of representation and now could promote and sell their work globally. But in Russia, the encounter with Western art markets was fraught. The Russian field of art still remains on the periphery of the international art world, struggling for legitimacy in the eyes of foreign experts and collectors. This book examines the challenges Russian art world actors faced in building a field of art in a society undergoing rapid and significant economic, political, and social transformation and traces those challenges into the twenty-first century. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, Art of Transition traces the ways the field of art has developed, evolved, and been sustained in Russia after socialism. It shows how Russia’s art world has grappled with its Soviet past and negotiated its standing in an unequal, globalized present. By attending to the historical legacy of Russian art throughout the twentieth century, this book constructs a genealogy of the contemporary field of postsocialist art that illuminates how Russians have come to understand themselves and their place in the world.

Like David James' earlier collection of essays, Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (1996), the present volume, Power Misses II: Cinema, Asian and Modern is concerned with popular cultural activity that propose alternatives and opposition to capitalist media. Now with a wider frame of reference, it moves globally from west to east, beginning with films made during the Korean Democracy Movement, and then turning to socialist realism in China and Taiwan, and to Asian American film and poetry in Los Angeles. Several other avant-garde film movements in L.A. created communities resistant to the culture industries centered there, as did elements in the classic New York avant-garde, here instanced in the work of Ken Jacobs and Andy Warhol. The final chapter concerns little-known films about communal agriculture in the Nottinghamshire village of Laxton, the only one where the medieval open-field system never suffered enclosure. This survival of the commons anticipated resistance to the extreme and catastrophic forms of privatization, monetization, and theft of the public commonweal in the advanced form of capitalism we know as neoliberalism.

"Offers an intense scholarly experience in its comprehensiveness, its variety of voices and its formal organization... the editors took a risk, experimented and have delivered a much-needed resource that upends the status-quo." - Architectural Histories, journal of the European Architectural History Network "Architectural theory interweaves interdisciplinary understandings with different practices, intentions and ways of knowing. This handbook provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to this challenging and shifting terrain, and will be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners alike." - Professor Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture "In this collection, architectural theory expands outward to interact with adjacent discourses such as sustainability, conservation, spatial practices, virtual technologies, and more. We have in The Handbook of Architectural Theory an example of the extreme generosity of architectural theory. It is a volume that designers and scholars of many stripes will welcome." - K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Harvard University The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory documents and builds upon the most innovative developments in architectural theory over the last two decades. Bringing into dialogue a range of geographically, institutionally and historically competing positions, it examines and explores parallel debates in related fields. The book is divided into eight sections: Power/Difference/Embodiment Aesthetics/Pleasure/Excess Nation/World/Spectacle History/Memory/Tradition Design/Production/Practice Science/Technology/Virtuality Nature/Ecology/Sustainability City/Metropolis/Territory. Creating openings for future lines of inquiry and establishing the basis for new directions for education, research and practice, the book is organized around specific case studies to provide a critical, interpretive and speculative enquiry into the relevant debates in architectural theory.