NEW TITLE ON THE READYMADE AND THE ABSENCE OF SKILL IN ART FROM VERSO

The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade
John Roberts
Publication: January 2008
Paperback ISBN 9781844671670 - $27.95/ £16.99/ $35CAN
Hardback ISBN 9781844671632 - $95/£60/$119CAN

“A profoundly original approach to the fate of the aesthetic and the avant-garde in contemporary society through the labor theory of culture… Over the last two decades, John Roberts has established himself as probably the most original Marxist critic of the contemporary visual arts around.”
Andrew Hemingway, Professor in History of Art, University College London

“Roberts’ Intangibilities of Form is a truly important book. It offers an unusually thoughtful, and genuinely radical, alternative to dominant ways of understanding the nature of art in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first.”
Alex Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan

In this intellectually wide-ranging book John Roberts develops a labor theory of culture as a model for explaining the dynamics of avant-garde and the expansion of the circuits of artistic authorship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

From Duchamp to Warhol, Conceptual art and the “post-visual” practices at the moment, Roberts explores the relationship between artistic labor and productive labor and the limits and possibilities of authorship. In doing so, he confronts a recurring theme of both conservative and radical detractors of modern art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: how is skill, and the seeming absence of skill in modern art, to be theorized and evaluated? Drawing on cognitive psychology, labour process theory, social anthropology and debates in contemporary political philosophy, Roberts’ book establishes a new critical topography for examining the cultural form of art today.

John Roberts is a senior research fellow in Fine Art at the University of Wolverhamption. His books include The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday; The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech); and Philosophizing the Everyday. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, the Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, third Text, and Cabinet magazine.

More information from the Verso website:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/r-titles/roberts_j_intangibilities_of_form.shtml

Available at all good bookshops or on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Intangibilities-Form-Skill-Deskilling-Readymade/dp/1844671674/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204909138&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intangibilities-Form-Skill-Deskilling-Readymade/dp/1844671674/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204909639&sr=1-1

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