Across a powerfully wide-ranging set of themes, theoretical registers and historical examples, John Roberts analyses the key problems that continue to confront art in the wake of conceptual art. Roberts examines the questions of artistic labour and technology, modernity and the 'new,' art and negation, identity and subjectivity, agency and audience, and form and value. Using these terms, the book provides a rigorous and ambitious examination of the limits and possibilities of art’s contribution to emancipatory discourse and practice.