Historical Materialism Book Series Art and Emancipation

In this powerful, wide-ranging collection written in the new millennium, John Roberts presents an overarching theoretical assessment of the key issues facing post-conceptual art and emancipatory practice. What constitutes the ‘new’ in art? Can art escape its commodity-form? How can audiences shape the social impact of art? 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.