Der englischsprachige Band Not Just a Mirror setzt sich mit grundlegenden Fragen des politischen Theaters in der Gegenwart auseinander und stellt künstlerisch-politische Strategien und Praktiken von Theatermachern aus aller Welt vor - u. a. Chto Delat, Milo Rau, Kretakör, Faustin Linyekula, Public Movement, Christoph Schlingensief, Akira Takayama. Mit Beiträgen von Julian Boal, Boris Buden, Matan Cohen, Annie Dorsen, Galit Eilat, Monika Ginterdorfer, John Jordan, Alexander Karschnia, Hervé...

What is contemporary curatorial thought? Current discourse on the topic is heating up with a new cocktail of bold ideas and ethical imperatives. these include: cooperative curating, especially with artists; the reimagination of museums; curating as knowledge production; the historicization of exhibitionmaking; and commitment to extra-artworld participatory activism. Less obvious, but increasingly of concern, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators and t...

Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the...

Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they ...

Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they...

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernit...

The spread of capsular civilization is a worst-case scenario that is taking shape before our very eyes, without us even being aware of it. In the face of the speed of our technology, the suburbanization of our daily lives and the ever more extreme but poignant polarization of our society, we feel obliged to return to the capsules of our vehicles, in architectural cocoons or urbanistic enclaves: malls, gated communities, amusement parks. Since September 11, the war in Iraq and the War on Te...

The form and future of cities is increasingly regarded as the product of inescapable processes: the strategic decisions of businesses, consumer preferences, deeply rooted cultural reflexes. Specifically, with the rise of a neoliberal and neo-conservative view of society, fundamental decisions about the everyday environment are increasingly determined by the laws of supply and demand or the clash of cultures. Is there still a place for democratic urban politics in such a climate? How can di...

In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. They revisit from fresh perspectives key issues regarding modernity and postmodernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents, as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, ...

Museum Frictions is the third volume in a bestselling series on culture, society, and museums. The first two volumes in the series, Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities, have become defining books for those interested in the politics of museum display and heritage sites. Another classic in the making, Museum Frictions is a lavishly illustrated examination of the significant and varied effects of the increasingly globalized world on contemporar...

9.5 Theses on Art and Class 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.Ben Davis currently lives and works in New York City where he is Executive Editor at Artinfo.

The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators, following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the lost radical conscience of art and culture.Art is a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by its ‘otherness’ and by history. All stories are crime stories, all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness. And all art contains a narrative. Radical...