Overview

What happened in art following the consolidation of capitalist globalisation after 1989? Drawing on work in art history, curating, critical theory, political economy and sociology, essays in Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century frame and substantiate the increasing attendance to economic relations as a defining trend in contemporary art’s history and one that brought to an end the hegemony of the cultural subject encountered in postmodern discourse. Contributions include reflections on art in its relation to property as well as to speculation and finance, immaterial labour and the avant-garde, the lessons of the past in pursuing an aesthetics of the economy, the ethics of care and the role of the art document, queer politics and class, the new feminist critique of economic subjects, migration, precarity and empowerment, the ambivalence of the commons, and a range of perspectives on the possibility of opposition, in the art world and beyond, to the biopolitical rule of global capital as the arbiter of human relations. Building on, extending and querying the curatorial project ECONOMY (Edinburgh and Glasgow 2013), the book puts forward a proposition that cuts across a number of ‘turns’ in the art of the past two decades, including socially engaged practices, seeking to connect localised approaches with the broader organisation of production and the unprecedented apparentness of the economy in the passage from the 20th to the 21st century. Contributors: Massimo de Angelis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Melanie Gilligan, Kirsten Lloyd, Renate Lorenz, Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis Tsianos, Andrea Phillips, John Roberts, Alberto Toscano, Gregory Sholette, Marina Vishmidt. Editors: Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh Kirsten Lloyd is Teaching Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Curator at Stills, Edinburgh

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9781781381380

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Reviews

Fascinating, extremely well-written and absorbing - this book targets effectively today's urgent debates. -- Professor Esther Leslie As postmodernism fades away, capitalism enters a major crisis and hot wars abound, a generation of artists and thinkers turn to political economy. Here is a book that shows why the reorientation is vital and necessary. -- Steve Edwards, Professor in Art-History-Materialism In these topsy turvy times, artists have turned their attention to matters economic, looking past the vaunted effects of the art market to an analysis of the workings of the broader society, bringing to bear their hard-won perspectives on labour, gender, identity, power, agency - and aesthetics. This book is an indispensable guide to these urgent debates. -- Martha Rosler

Fascinating, extremely well-written and absorbing - this book targets effectively today's urgent debates. -- Professor Esther Leslie

Author Information

Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. Kirsten Lloyd is Teaching Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Curator at Stills, Edinburgh.

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