Julian Stallabrass: Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (2006)

“Bloody toy soldiers, gilded shopping carts, and embroidered tents. Contemporary art is supposed to be a realm of freedom where artists shock, break taboos, flout generally received ideas, and switch between confronting viewers with works of great emotional profundity and jaw-dropping triviality. But away from shock tactics in the gallery, there are many unanswered questions. Who is really running the art world? What effect has America’s growing political and cultural dominance had on art?

Julian Stallabrass takes us inside the international art world to answer these questions, and to argue that behind contemporary art’s variety and apparent unpredictability lies a grim uniformity. Its mysteries are all too easily explained, its depths much shallower than they seem. Contemporary art seeks to bamboozle its viewers while being the willing slave of business and government.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2006
Volume 146 of Very short introductions
ISBN 0192806467, 9780192806468
154 pages

Publisher

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Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe (eds.): The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009)

“What exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism’s origins and growth as a political and economic movement.

Although modern neoliberalism was born at the “Colloque Walter Lippmann” in 1938, it only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a partisan “thought collective,” in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1947. Its original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Luigi Einaudi. From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the Washington Consensus.

The Road from Mont Pèlerin presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among neoliberal scholars and their political and corporate allies regarding trade unions, development economics, antitrust policies, and the influence of philanthropy. The book captures the depth and complexity of the neoliberal “thought collective” while examining the numerous ways that neoliberal discourse has come to shape the global economy.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2009
ISBN 0674033183, 9780674033184
469 pages

Publisher

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Self-Organisation: Counter-Economic Strategies (2006)

The book Self-organisation / counter-economic strategies was initiated by the artists’ group Superflex, but it is not about them. It is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative models for social and economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures. The counter-economic strategies presented here are alternatives to classical capitalist economic organisation that exploit, or have been produced by, the existing global economic system.

Essays by ten writers cover a wide cross-section of activity, from new approaches to intellectual property and the implications of the free/open source software movement to political activism and the de facto self-organisation embodied in informal architecture and the so-called black economy.

Self-organisation/ counter-economic strategies is not a comprehensive overview or an attempt to unify these diverse interpretations. It is intended as a toolbox of ideas, situations and approaches, and includes many practical examples.

Commissioned texts include Will Bradley on GuaranaPower, Anupam Chander & Madhavi Sunder on fan fiction and intellectual property, Bruno Comparato on the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, Mika Hannula on self-organisation and civil society, Alfonso Hernández on the barrio of Tepito in Mexico City, Susan Kelly on “What is to be done?”, Lawrence Lessig on problems with copyright law, Marjetica Potrč on parallelism and fragmentation in the Western Balkans and the EU, and Tere Vadén on the future of information societies, plus interviews with Craig Baldwin (A.T.A. Gallery, Other Cinema), Brett Bloom (Temporary Services, Mess Hall), Sasha Costanza-Chock (Indymedia), Adrienne Lauby (Free Speech Radio News), and Nigel Parry (Electronic Intifada).

Editors Will Bradley, Mika Hannula, Cristina Ricupero, Superflex
Publisher Sternberg Press, 2006
Producer NIFCA, Nordic Institute of Contemporary Arts; with The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Montana, Denmark
NIFCA publication # 28
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence 2.5
ISBN 1933128135
336 pages

Publisher

PDF (41 MB, updated on 2014-12-22)