Author(s): Peter Osborne

Art Theory

How does contemporary art best respond to social crisis?  Through reflection on its own crisis of form Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form.  Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides.  

These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement of contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland.  

The book moves from philosophical issues, via the lingering shadows of medium-specificity (in photography and art music), and the changing states of museums, to analyses of the peculiar ways that works of art relate to time.  To give artistic form to crisis, it is suggested, one needs to understand contemporary art's own constitutive crisis of form.