In memoriam.
Dean Kissick, “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art,” Harper’s, December 2024. All quotes from Kissick are from this article.
Dave Beech, “Art and the Politics of Eliminating Handicraft,” Historical Materialism 27, no. 1 (2019).
See Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Polity, 2021); and Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023).
Dominique Routhier, With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation (Verso, 2023).
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books, 1995), 142; Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, trans. Robert Hurley (Semiotext(e), 2020).
See Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, CODE: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2023).
Peter Osborne, “The Planet as Political Subject?,” New Left Review, no. 145 (January–February 2024).
Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, 2018), x.
See Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth (Bloomsbury, 2022); Sam Lefebvre, A Generous Grift: Museums, Finance Capital, and the Clash of Cultural Workers and Collector-Trustees (Oakland Print Shop, 2022); and Dana Kopel, “Is It Time to Abolish museums?,” The Nation, May 25, 2021 →.
Michael Shane Boyle, The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2024).
See for example David Joselit, After Art (Princeton University Press, 2013).
See Charmaine Chua, “Abolition Is A Constant Struggle: Five Lessons from Minneapolis,” Theory & Event 23, no. 4 (2020).
See Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr, “The Self-Abolition of the Poet,” Jacket2, January 2, 2014 →; Andreas Petrossiants, “Preliminary Notes toward a Destituent Art,” Social Text 159, no. 2 (June 2024); and Seb B. Grossmann, “Abolition,” in “Keywords for Value and Culture,” special issue, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (forthcoming).
Saidiya Hartman, “A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route,” Narrative, Winter 2007 →.
See for instance Ciarán Finlayson, Perpetual Slavery (Floating Opera Press, 2023).
M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition (Pluto, 2023).
See for instance Eunsong Kim’s brilliant repositioning of Duchamp and the ready-made in The Politics of Collecting (Duke University Press, 2024).
Roland Simon, Histoire critique de l’ultragauche (Senonevero, 2015).
See Jasper Bernes, The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso, 2025).
See Fred Moten, “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me,” in perennial fashion presence falling (Wave Books, 2023) →: “art don’t work / for abolition. / art works for / bosses, like you / and me. if ‘let’s / abolish art’ sounds / too close to ‘let’s / abolish you and / me,’ it’s ’cause it / is.”