2024/06/30 by Eva Kit Wah Man · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Cinema and Media Studies #Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayae033
openalex publication_date 2024/06/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Vid Simoniti begins the book by asking when and how contemporary art became political. He then sets out the topics of the following six chapters: Realism for Our Time: On Art and Truth; Utility and Utopia: On Socially Engaged Art; On the Role of Aesthetics in Political Art; Spectacle and Surveillance: On Art in the Internet Age; Creativity in the Face of Extinction: On Art and Climate Change; and Remaking the World's Hinges. These topics reveal the focus of the book to be an investigation of how contemporary artists have aimed to communicate about social-political events and create change through their work. Attention should also be paid to the images collected in the central pages of the book, which illustrate representative works mentioned in the text and are used to support the author’s arguments about political interventions that artists have made. The first plate tells a story from the Greek island of Lesbos where many refugees have been stranded while waiting for European states to decide on their destiny. The images show that visual artists can produce work that reveals facts and can change the perception paradigm of ordinary people, as the author continues to argue throughout the book.