Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Preliminary Material / John Roberts -- Copyright Page / John Roberts -- Preface / John Roberts -- Acknowledgements / John Roberts -- Introduction Emancipatory Technique, the Avant-Garde and ‘Alter-Realism’ / Kim Charnley -- Part 1 Value -- Chapter 1 Labour, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill / John Roberts -- Chapter 2 Art After Deskilling / John Roberts -- Chapter 3 The ‘Incomplete’ Commodity: Art, Value and Value-Form Theory / John Roberts -- Chapter 4 After the Crisis of Value: Some Further Reflections on Skill, Deskilling and Art / John Roberts -- Chapter 5 Notes on Craft: Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Leach and the Vessel Tradition / John Roberts -- Part 2 Technique -- Chapter 6 The Amateur’s Retort / John Roberts -- Chapter 7 The Practice of Failure / John Roberts -- Chapter 8 Trickster: Performativity and Critique in Rod Dickinson’s Crop-Circles / John Roberts -- Chapter 9 Roy Bhaskar, Critical Realism and Cultural Theory / John Roberts -- Chapter 10 The Antinomies of Iconoclasm / John Roberts -- Chapter 11 Writerly Artists: Conceptual Art, Bildung and the Intellectual Division of Labour / John Roberts -- Chapter 12 The ‘Black Debt’: Art & Language’s Writing / John Roberts -- Part 3 Praxis -- Chapter 13 Productivism and Its Contradictions / John Roberts -- Chapter 14 After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Centre and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness / John Roberts -- Chapter 15 Art After Art in the Expanded Field / John Roberts -- Chapter 16 Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons / John Roberts -- Chapter 17 Art, ‘Enclave Theory’ and the Communist Imaginary / John Roberts -- Chapter 18 Postconceptualism and Anti-Pathos / John Roberts -- Chapter 19 Race, Black Modernism and the Critique of Identity / John Roberts -- Part 4 Image -- Chapter 20 The Political Economy of the Image / John Roberts -- Chapter 21 Realism, Alter-Realism and the Question of Legibility / John Roberts -- Chapter 22 Ideation and Photography: a Critique of François Laruelle’s Concept of Abstraction / John Roberts -- Chapter 23 Philosophy, Culture, Image: Jacques Rancière’s Constructivism / John Roberts -- Chapter 24 Some Reflections on the Image and the Early Avant-Garde: Victor Shklovsky, Error and The End of Saint Petersburg / John Roberts -- Chapter 25 After Lefebvre: The Everyday, the Image and Cultural Theory / John Roberts -- Chapter 26 Tár , Tarr , and Tarr, and Other Sticky Things. / John Roberts -- Part 5 History -- Chapter 27 Memories, History, Mnemotechnics / John Roberts -- Chapter 28 Dialectic and Post-Hegelian Dialectic (Again): Žižek, Bhaskar, Badiou / John Roberts -- Chapter 29 On Error: Hegel and Spinoza / John Roberts -- Chapter 30 Art and the Politics of Time-as-Substance / John Roberts -- Chapter 31 ‘The Newest in What Is Oldest’: History, Historicism and the Temporality of the Avant-Garde / John Roberts -- Back Matter -- Bibliography / John Roberts -- Index / John Roberts.

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.

English

Description based on print version record.