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Across a powerfully wide-ranging set of themes, theoretical registers and historical examples, John Roberts analyses the key problems that continue to confront art after conceptual art, in the light of art’s longstanding relationship to market and institution the commodity and mass culture: namely, artistic labour and technology, modernity and the ‘new’, art and negation, identity and subjectivity, agency and audience, form and value.
In these terms, the book provides a rigorous and ambitious, examination of the limits and possibilities of art’s contribution to emancipatory discourse and practice.
Price: $212.00
Pages: 520
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Historical Materialism Book Series
Publication Date:
08 November 2023
ISBN: 9789004686861
Format: Hardcover
“In this collection of brilliant, exciting, and often surprising essays on value, technique, and praxis, John Roberts proves that Marxist art criticism
is alive and kicking in our contemporary moment. This writing is where I go when my spirits are down. For there is something uniquely invigorating and even joyful about its clarity, originality, and conceptual precision.”
— Sianne Ngai, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, University of Chicago
“A tour-de-force organised across challenging yet essential concepts for art history, philosophy, and emancipation as a trans-generational project: 'value', 'technique', 'praxis', 'image', 'history'. Nothing less was expected from one of Europe’s most incisive art theorists thinking through Marxism. From photography to unclassifiable artmaking to the alienation of capitalist modernity, the themes and threads of John Roberts’ essays help bring into focus an era of unreasonable hope: ours.”
— Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh
“Through an exhilarating series of theoretical concatenations, Art and Emancipation restores the material conditions and formal categories of post-object art. In striking contrast to other accounts, however, Roberts proceeds not through the dubious rehabilitation of aesthetic experience but by grounding art in forms of labor and generalized social practices. There is no better work on art’s precarious but privileged status after the readymade.”
— Devin Fore, Professor of German, Princeton University
"Is another 'end of art' possible? John Roberts’ book Art and Emancipation points brilliantly towards art’s only horizon of emancipation through self-abolition. In capitalist modernity abolition, although immanent to art's technique, cannot be accomplished by art itself. The emancipation of art is, rather, inexorably entangled with the de-alienation of labour."
— Angela Harutyunyan, Associate Professor of Modern Contemporary Art and Theory, American University of Beirut
— Sianne Ngai, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, University of Chicago
“A tour-de-force organised across challenging yet essential concepts for art history, philosophy, and emancipation as a trans-generational project: 'value', 'technique', 'praxis', 'image', 'history'. Nothing less was expected from one of Europe’s most incisive art theorists thinking through Marxism. From photography to unclassifiable artmaking to the alienation of capitalist modernity, the themes and threads of John Roberts’ essays help bring into focus an era of unreasonable hope: ours.”
— Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh
“Through an exhilarating series of theoretical concatenations, Art and Emancipation restores the material conditions and formal categories of post-object art. In striking contrast to other accounts, however, Roberts proceeds not through the dubious rehabilitation of aesthetic experience but by grounding art in forms of labor and generalized social practices. There is no better work on art’s precarious but privileged status after the readymade.”
— Devin Fore, Professor of German, Princeton University
"Is another 'end of art' possible? John Roberts’ book Art and Emancipation points brilliantly towards art’s only horizon of emancipation through self-abolition. In capitalist modernity abolition, although immanent to art's technique, cannot be accomplished by art itself. The emancipation of art is, rather, inexorably entangled with the de-alienation of labour."
— Angela Harutyunyan, Associate Professor of Modern Contemporary Art and Theory, American University of Beirut
John Roberts, PhD (University of Wolverhampton, 2005), is Professor of Art & Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton and author of numerous books including The Intangibilities of Form (Verso, 2006), The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2011), Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2015), and Capitalism and the Limits of Desire (Bloomsbury 2022).