Grant H. Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, author of Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, and coeditor of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995-2010, all also published by Duke University Press.
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Description
Introduction 1 I. From Beauty to Dissensus 1. Freedom and Sovereignty 19 2. Communism and the Aesthetic State 48 II. Negation and Performativity 3. From Vanguard to Avant-Garde 85 4. Activism and Autonomy in the 1960s 108 III. Autonomy since the 1980s 5. The Rise of the Neo-Avant-Garde 145 6. The Hirschhorn Monument: Autonomy as Brand and Alibi 180 Conclusion. Aesthetics beyond Semblance 212 Notes 219 Works Cited 243 Index 259
"An extraordinarily knowledgeable explanation for those outside the art world, as well as those critically within it, of the philosophical traditions and social contradictions within which artists do their work. This is a book to own." - Susan Buck-Morss, The Graduate Center, City University of New York "Kester's book is a highly valuable examination of the intertwined trajectories of aesthetic experience and autonomy." - Matthew Bowman (Art Monthly)