A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of art’s complex relationship to power.Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market’s fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought before the public in two ways\u2014as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function.Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today’s mainstream Western art\u2014which he finds behaving more and more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself\u2014by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of the modern artwork. Read more<\/p>\n
Review By probing unacknowledged, repressed, or otherwise unexamined relationships that hover in the background of art-world conversation, Art Power recombines categories, reconfigures assumptions, and, in the end, reimagines what art writing can be.\u2014Matthew Jesse Jackson, Bookforum\u2014It’s a seemingly unlimited supply of surprising, even audacious truths that many invested in the art world might prefer not to think too hard about.\u2014Canadian Art\u2014The range of topics canvassed in Art Power is impressive…. All of these subjects have been comprehensively treated elsewhere, but rarely with Groys’ penetrating eye for the unexpected upshot of such developments.\u2014Frieze\u2014 Review The writings of Boris Groys create a discursive environment where art can be powerful. His commentaries on artistic activities turn aesthetics from a rhetoric of desire to a rhetoric of thinking. The critique replacing consumerism is finally transformed to a logic of the political, where his writing derives its own power.\u2015Peter Weibel About the Author Boris Groys is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is the author of Art Power, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (both published by the MIT Press), and other books. Read more<\/p>\n
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