9781786634207
The Postconceptual Condition
Critical Essays
  • -1
  • 0
  • 1
Paperback
Paperback with free ebook
$29.95$20.9630% off
240 pages / January 2018 / 9781786634207
Ebook
Ebook
$9.99
January 2018 / 9781786634221
Hardback
Hardback with free ebook
$95.00
240 pages / January 2018 / 9781786634900

Not in stock

Tracking the postconceptual dimensions of contemporary art

If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, “it is the function of artistic form … to make historical content into a philosophical truth” then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that truth. Contemporary art makes this work more difficult than ever. Today’s art is a point of condensation for a vast array of social and historical forces, economic and political forms, and technologies of image production. Contemporary art, Osborne maintains, expresses this condition through its distinctively postconceptual form. These essays—extending the scope and arguments of Osborne’s Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art—move from a philosophical consideration of the changing temporal conditions of capitalist modernity, via problems of formalism, the politics of art and the changing shape of art institutions, to interpretation and analysis of particular works by Akram Zaatari, Xavier Le Roy and Ilya Kabakov, and the postconceptual situation of a crisis-ridden New Music.

Reviews

“Very little philosophical writing is inspiring enough to catalyse art and bring it into being. Peter Osborne’s writing is consistently in this category.”

“Peter Osborne’s new book—The Postconceptual Condition—philosophically maps a chasm of truly mythic proportions, namely that between art and politics. While this chasm is quintessentially modern, the meaning of "modern" keeps changing and with it the structure of historical experience. Global or transnational modernity forces us to revise notions of ‘autonomy’ or ‘activism,’ and conditions the work of art in ways that mark a clear break with its modern past, i.e. Conceptualism. In confronting the fate of art institutions (the biennale form) and analyzing the conditions of the artwork proper, Osborne gets a critical grip on that beast that calls the chasm between art and politics home—a creature better known as ‘the cultural logic of high capitalism.’”

Verso recommends

Close-button
9781786634207