Time is a gift that the subjective observer gives back to an objectively existing universe that contains and simultaneously does not contain a distant star—a celestial object we can see from our perspective here and now, even when it has ceased to exist in the time its light has taken to reach our eyes. As artists, we look to the cosmos, to the substances that enable life, to our bodies and their sensations, to the entries recorded in archives, to the stories that pass between generations, and to our own reading of the data we receive and sieve between ourselves, all to furnish materials between our thinking and our practice.

Much of the art in “Global Conceptualism” came from areas under de facto authoritarian rule, making clear to me the reality that in a repressive state, the ownership of time is taken over by the government. Contemplation becomes secondary to communication. The constraints that accompany this shift in ownership force engagement with new issues. Two of these are the avoidance of the erosion of information and the efficiency of passing on messages. Much of the work was extremely direct, sometimes mere slogans, and easily and quickly absorbed. The attempt to reappropriate time becomes a subversive activity, and works happen or are placed in the interstices that are left open or overlooked by repressive control.

What is the role of theory in relation to “art”—traditionally positioned in philosophical discourse as a sort of placeholder for creative resistance and even emancipation? And how does this role change when the historical coordinates for theorizing art—modern, avant-garde, or contemporary—reveal themselves, as Eunsong Kim details in her recent book The Politics of Collecting, to have been fundamentally tethered to the legal fiction of white property?

Portending contemporary depravities to come, two art pieces made auction headlines at the end of 2024. First was Duchamp’s infamous ready-made In Advance of the Broken Arm, which sold for $3.075 million; then, in acceleration, Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—a banana taped onto a wall—fetched $6.2 million. The piece was purchased by a crypto overlord who proceeded to “eat” the work as a way to partake in the presence and history of transnational class warfare. Though this is not how either event wa...

It is impossible lately to read descriptions of exhibits and events at any given museum or gallery and not be presented parcels of language clogged with catchphrases and sound bites that fall flat as empty signposts advertising notions that bear no relation to either the necessary emergence or stakes of the theory under citation. This widening gap between aesthetic propositions in closed recirculation and dynamism in the social field from which they are first generated as the surplus of lived struggles symptomatizes only that the moment to seize and realize the artistic or theoretical proposition has passed. The remainder, the finished “work,” becomes a mere shell of an evaporated content—outliving, vampire-like, the contingencies from which it sprung.

How to understand the ecstasy of one’s own freedom to be in control of one’s own means of production as generative source material? In this sense, doesn’t the use of theory also serve as a proxy or de facto escape from class struggle? A space of movement for something that is felt but not yet understood by the masses? A way to avoid conversation by whatever means are available?

The institutions of art have often served as consensus-building mechanisms in this totality, structurally and ideologically laundering the imperative to extract profit while offering avenues of representation of alterity that remain notional on the whole so far as their own conditions of possibility are not at stake. For the time being, the reflective shimmer of a politically radicalized art necessarily feeds off what it critiques, until, I would propose, it can learn to operate transversally with struggles in the infrastructure—both in the arts and elsewhere.

This orientation feels especially important because the questions Silvia Federici raises in her PhD thesis on Lukács’s aesthetics remain unresolved. What is the relationship between aesthetics and political thought? Can there be a Marxist theory of art that does not fall into idealism? How do moments of crisis—political, philosophical, economic—shape and destabilize our understanding of the world?

From academic and activist spheres, thinkers have experimented with ways to reverse and respond to this repressive system, generating a body of active thought that questions both the hegemonic historical narrative and current forms of colonialism. The central question emerges: How do postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial theories get translated, transformed, and sometimes betrayed when they encounter the constraints of cultural institutions? In Spain, the debate over colonial history remains an unresolved problem precisely because it cannot be resolved through institutional means alone.

Being responsible irresponsibly means letting go of the fundamental divide between imagination and politics. It means being faithful to imagination, blindly and fearlessly, otherwise it will deflate uninspiringly or pop from too much pressure, like an overinflated balloon. But it also means being conscious of imagination's context. This is the responsible side of irresponsibility. Imagination is not God-given or rent-free, but rather emerges from pasts, presents, and futures: embedded in reality, as it was, as it is, as it could be. Imagination is not self-indulgent reverie; it has its anthropological scriptures, artistic preconceptions, and socially tested waters.

As for art writing, the speed and connectivity of digital media has created pressure that it be shorter, faster, more visual, more topical, more general interest. The takeover of interpersonal communications by digital technology has flooded the sensorium; in the US, the specter of post-literacy was coming on fast at just the moment that Bosker wrote “never read the wall text” as her major takeaway from observing art spaces. In major parts of cultural production, cachet has moved from the hipster obscurity of the late-Gen X, early millennial era of the 2000s and towards relatable transparency, from familiarity with intellectual references and towards responsiveness to current events.

After Joseph Beuys proclaimed that “everyone is an artist,” there is nothing scandalous in claiming that art can be anything. The complaint that “nowadays it seems everything can be art!” elevates the layperson to a critic or a theorist, a gatekeeper who determines inclusion and exclusion. “It’s not art!” might further strengthen the complainer’s otherwise precarious authority. If the complaint were made more explicit—“It’s not art! It’s shit!”—our lay critic might face a conundrum acknowledged by Piero Manzoni: it is art and it is shit, merda d’artista.