ISBN: 1781680949 9781781680940

Category: Art / Criticism & Theory

Page count: 288

<p><b>A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of <i>The Politics of Time</i></b></p>Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? <i>Anywhere or Not at All</i> is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. <i>Anywhere or Not at All</i> maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism. <br><br> <b>Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA)</b>