As the Creative City model for urban regeneration founders on the rocks of the recession, and the New Labour public art commissioning frenzy it triggered recedes, Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater take stock of an era of highly instrumentalised public art making. 

Focusing on artists and consultants who have engaged critically with the exclusionary politics of urban regeneration, their analysis locates such practice within a schematic history of urban development’s neoliberal mode. Breaking down into a report and a collection of interviews, this investigation consistently focuses on the forms and, indeed, possibility of critical public art within a regime that fetishes ‘creativity’ whilst systematically destroying its preconditions in its pursuit of capital accumulation. How, they ask, is critical art shaped by its interaction with this aspect of biopolitical governance?

ISBN 978-1906496425

Date of Publication: 9/9/2010

126 pages