Why the avant-garde of art needs to be rehabilitated today
John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. His books includeThe Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, and The Necessity of Errors. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, Third Text, and Cabinet magazine.
Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is without question the most
informed, cogent, and intellectually grounded defence of
avant-garde praxis today. Roberts provides a vision of art that is
disabused of the business models of the neoliberal culture
industries, that neither dissolves politics into art nor attempts
to insulate art from functioning as an emancipatory revolutionary
force.
*Marc James Léger, author of Brave New Avant Garde and The
Neoliberal Undead*
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*
Roberts's 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 (in praise of The Intangibilities of Form)*
The Intangibilities of Form proposes nothing less than a powerfully
original labor theory of culture, highlighting the prominence of a
context shaped by the readymade, to account for the constitutive
interlacing of contemporary art and technology, skill, and
deskilling. By situating the instance of conceptual art within an
environment of production marked by the structuring logic of the
commodity form and social division of labor, he has both restored
to art criticism and art history a lost vocation, and delivered to
cultural studies and its current explanatory ambitions a demanding
challenge.
*Harry Harootunian (in praise of The Intangibilities of Form)*
Simultaneously performs and advocates the conceptual terms through
which [Roberts] understands a contemporary avant-garde program.
*Red Wedge*
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