Jonathan Harris (ed.): Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art (2004)

This collection of essays sets out to identify and examine the kinds of new institutions and social relations that have emerged and begun to shape the global organisation of contemporary visual art over the past twenty-five years. These institutions and relations, contributors argue, are not simply implicated in the exhibition of art – more than that, they have come to play significant roles in commissioning art production as well as mediating its reception in a number of different ways. Given this reorganisation, the set of concepts through which the ‘art world’ can be thought must be radically reviewed. Developments and transformations in, for example, patronage and managerial arrangements – on a global scale – have begun to outrun existing assumptions, categories and accounts. Terms such as ‘institution’, ‘means of production’ and ‘art world’ itself are invoked and critically scrutinised in all of the essays in this book. Some authors address these and other concepts within detailed empirical case studies, others by experimental application of novel theoretical premises.

This collection also includes discussion by those directly involved in the production and selling of contemporary art, reviewing the increasingly internationalised network now ordering contemporary art’s conditions of production, mediation and consumption. This book shows the complex interaction of the socio-political forces that bear on the art world as well as the tensions between those with different interests in art, raising vital questions about the changed relations between art, society and politics.

Publisher Liverpool University Press, 2004
Volume 7 of Tate Liverpool Critical Forum
ISBN 0853237395, 9780853237396
216 pages

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Hannah Higgins: Fluxus Experience (2002)

“In this work, Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate, contentious—Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as affirming transactions between self and world.

Fluxus began in the 1950s with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how and why it’s important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics’ and curators’ perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus art for pedagogy in general.

Although it was commonly associated with political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520228677, 9780520228672
259 pages

Reviews: Ken Friedman (Design Research, 2003), Jennie Klein (PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2004), Roy R. Behrens (Leonardo, 2004), Branislav Jakovljevic (TDR: The Drama Review, 2004), Ágnes Ivacs (Artpool, n.d.).

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Clement Greenberg: Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961–)

Collected essays which appeared originally in Partisan Review, The Nation, Commentary, and other publications.

Publisher Beacon Press, Boston
Volume 212 of Beacon paperbacks
ISBN 0807066818
278 pages

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