Art: A Verso Bookshelf
Our definitive collection on Art and Politics.
When galleries display alt-right propaganda, participate in social cleansing, and are sponsored by arms manufacturers, the status of art production must be called into question. How do art and politics intersect? Here we list writers at the forefront of these discussions.
We have 50% off ALL our print books and 80% off ALL ebooks until January 1 as part of our end-of-year sale! See full details here, as well as further reading lists and our Gift Guide, End of Year Highlights.
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]It’s not capitalism, it’s not neoliberalism—what if it’s something worse?
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Grace Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalisation of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]In The Social Photo, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson develops bold new ways of understanding the transformations wrought by these image-making and sharing technologies and the cultural objects they have ushered in: the selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo. Jurgenson shows how these devices and platforms have remade the world and our understanding of ourselves within it.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]Rancière’s magnum opus on the aesthetic.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]A leading philosopher presents a radical manifesto for the future of art and film.
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]An award-winning cultural history of how we experience the world through art, film and architecture.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]Tracking the postconceptual dimensions of contemporary art.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, Steyerl exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]Leading artists, theorists, and writers exhume the dystopian and utopian futures contained within the present.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]What does art tell us about ourselves? John Berger on the politics and consolations of creativity.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]A lifetime’s encounter with artists: from prehistoric cave painting to the present.
[book-strip index="15" style="buy"]Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche.
[book-strip index="16" style="buy"]High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson’s major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting and music, are pitted against late-modernist ones (in film) as well as a variety of postmodern experiments: all of which attempt, in their different ways, to invent new forms to grasp a specific social totality. Throughout these historical periods, argues Jameson, the question of narrative persists through its multiple formal changes and metamorphoses.
[book-strip index="17" style="buy"]A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet.
[book-strip index="18" style="buy"]The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond.
[book-strip index="19" style="buy"]A meditation, in words and images, on the practice of drawing, by the author of Ways of Seeing.
