Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Book Review: Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism
Danielle Child's book tackles the neoliberal penetration of artistic production from a Marxist perspective
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism
by Danielle Child
(Bloomsbury, £21.99)
UNUSUALLY for a young art historian, Danielle Child bases her discussion of the relationship between contemporary art, labour and capitalism on the “Marxian” ideology that art, as part of the superstructure, is defined by its economic base.
Focusing mostly on US and British art, where neoliberalism has been strongest, she argues that its managerialist, fragmented, individualised and precarious working models are mirrored by new artistic practices since the 1990s.
Tracing these to the era’s “prehistory” in the late 1960s and 1970s, she explains how monumental public art projects such as those of Claes Oldenburg were fabricated by new, specialist firms.
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