e-flux Journal #21
<p>Could it be that contemporary art <i>is</i> neoliberalism in its most purified form? At the center of our December issue is a constellation of unusually frank essays mounting an indictment of contemporary art’s complicity with gentrification and capital accumulation, with processes of divestiture and exploitation.</p> <p>We would like to see a way out of this, but questioning whether cultural work can actually have a real effect on power relations, or whether capital, public or private, should really be a measure of art’s civic or cultural value in the first place, only serves to accelerate the endless cycling—consuming life, finding work, making money, finding funding, spending it. And as you feel yourself somehow sitting next to your own working body, your last hopeful, analytical nerve pushes you to ask whether total withdrawal might be the key to reclaiming your life as you might have once known it. Or could it be the opposite: work harder, push the machine till it utterly collapses (or you do), and just see what happens? And the other question: What happened to art?…</p> <p><b>Editorial</b><br /> Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle</p> <p><b>Exhaustion and Senile Utopia of the Coming European Insurrection</b><br /> Franco Berardi Bifo</p> <p><b>A Letter from Donetsk: Art Amidst the Roses</b><br /> Ekaterina Degot</p> <p><b>Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place</b><br /> Liam Gillick</p> <p><b>In Conversation with Hakim Bey</b><br /> Hans Ulrich Obrist</p> <p><b>Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part I</b><br /> Martha Rosler</p> <p><b>Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy</b><br /> Hito Steyerl</p>
Editors: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Contributors: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Ekaterina Degot, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hakim Bey, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl
Part of: e-flux journal
ISSN: 21641625