Authors:
Argues that art/culture maintains a status quo of creative inequality and imaginative poverty
Proposes a politics of creativity and aesthetics for a post-art/culture world
Engages with popular media debates and deep philosophies of art and society
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
Offering a negative definition of art in relation to the concept of culture, this book establishes the concept of ‘art/culture’ to describe the unity of these two fields around named-labour, idealised creative subjectivity and surplus signification. Contending a conceptual and social reality of a combined ‘art/culture’ , this book demonstrates that the failure to appreciate the dynamic totality of art and culture by its purported negators is due to almost all existing critiques of art and culture being defences of a ‘true’ art or culture against ‘inauthentic’ manifestations, and art thus ultimately restricting creativity to the service of the bourgeois commodity regime. While the evidence that art/culture enables commodification has long been available, the deduction that art/culture itself is fundamentally of the world of commodification has failed to gain traction. By applying a nuanced analysis of both commodification and the larger systems of ideological power, the book considers how the ‘surplus’ of art/culture is used to legitimate the bourgeois status quo rather than unravel it. It also examines possibilities for a post-art/culture world based on both existing practices that challenge art/culture identity as well as speculations on the integration of play and aesthetics into general social life. An out-and-out negation of art and culture, this book offers a unique contribution to the cultural critique landscape.
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Authors and Affiliations
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Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Liam Dee
About the author
Liam Dee is an independent researcher who received his PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies from Macquarie University, Australia, in 2007. After a visiting fellowship at the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature in the University of Minnesota, he taught design history and theory at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, and also works for the Australian government in Canberra.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Against Art and Culture
Authors: Liam Dee
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7092-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-10-7091-4Published: 24 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-13-4993-5Published: 23 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-981-10-7092-1Published: 12 December 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 289
Topics: Cultural Theory, Arts, Global/International Culture