Boris Groys - Going Public

Let us consider art from the perspective of the producer.

Going Public

Boris Groys

If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Powerand The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art—which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place.

Boris Groys (1947, East Berlin) is Professor at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Design, Karlsruhe. He is the author of many books, including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, The Communist Postscript, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism.

 

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Poetics vs. Aesthetics

The Obligation to Self-Design

The Production of Sincerity

Politics of Installation

The Loneliness of the Project

Comrades of Time

The Weak Universalism

Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies

Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Immortal Bodies

Category
Aesthetics, Avant-Garde, Communism, Contemporary Art, Labor & Work, Marxism
Subject
Art Criticism, Conceptual & Post-Conceptual Art, Autonomy, Knowledge Production, Post-Communism, Socialist Realism, Soviet Union, Russia

Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist, and an internationally renowned expert on Soviet-era art and literature, especially the Russian avant-garde.

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November 2010, English
10.8 x 17.8 cm, 168 pages, 9 b/w illustrations, softcover
ISBN 978-1-934105-30-6

Publisher
Sternberg Press

Design
Jeff Ramsey

Cover design
Liam Gillick

 

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