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Synopsis
Many people who look at art today decry it for the lack of craft skill in its production, whether it be painting, photography or sculpture. In "Intangibilities of Form", John Roberts sheds an entirely new light on this obsolescence of traditional craft skills in contemporary art, exploring the technological and social developments that gave rise to those postmodern theories that suggest that art may not require an author and certainly not one with any technical ability. Envisioning Marcel Duchamp as a theorist of artistic labour, Roberts describes how he opened up new circuits of authorship to the artist. He then looks at how these approaches proliferated in art after the 1960s and in the rise of Conceptual art. In explaining why the question of authorship has been so fundamental to avant-garde art and neo-avant-garde in the 20th century, "The Intangibilities of Form" is a formidable history of the hidden labours of the artwork.
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Review
A profoundly original approach to the fate of the aesthetic and the avant-garde in contemporary society through the labour theory of culture... Over the last two decades, John Roberts has established himself as probably the most original Marxist critic of the contemporary visual arts around. --Andrew Hemingway
Roberts' Intangibilities of Form is a truly important book. It offers an unusually thoughtful, and genuinely radical, alternative to dominant ways of understanding the nature of art in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. --Alex Potts
The Intangibilities of Form proposes nothing less than a powerfully original labor theory of culture, highlighting the prominence of a context shaped by the readymade, to account for the constitutive interlacing of contemporary art and technology, skill and deskilling. By situating the instance of conceptual art within an environment of production marked by the structuring logic of the commodity form and social division of labor, he has both restored to art criticism and art history a lost vocation, and delivered to cultural studies and its current explanatory ambitions a demanding challenge. --Harry Harootunian
"A profoundly original approach to the fate of the aesthetic and the avant-garde in contemporary society through the labour theory of culture ... Over the last two decades, John Roberts has established himself as probably the most original Marxist critic of the contemporary visual arts around."--Andrew Hemingway
"Roberts' "Intangibilities of Form" is a truly important book. It offers an unusually thoughtful, and genuinely radical, alternative to dominant ways of understanding the nature of art in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first."--Alex Potts
"The "Intangibilities of Form" proposes nothing less than a powerfully original labor theory of culture, highlighting the prominence of a context shaped by the readymade, to account for the constitutive interlacing of contemporary art and technology, skill and deskilling. By situating the instance of conceptual art within an environment of production marked by the structuring logic of the commodity form and social division of labor, he has both restored to art criticism and art history a lost vocation, and delivered to cultural studies and its current explanatory ambitions a demanding challenge."--Harry Harootunian
About the Author
John Roberts is Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including: The Art of Interruption; Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester University Press/St.Martins Press, 1998), The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech) (Verso, 2002) and Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (Pluto/Michigan University Press, 2006). He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, the Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, Third Text and Cabinet magazine.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherVerso Books
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 1844671631
- ISBN 13 9781844671632
- BindingHardcover
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages249
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