Dave Beech

Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production

Art and Postcapitalism

Key texts on beauty and its revival in contemporary art.

Beauty

John Roberts

Dave Beech and John Roberts develop what they call a 'counter-intuitive' notion of the philistine, with insights on cultural division and exclusion.

The Philistine Controversy

After the Educational Turn explores the condition and critical potential of contemporary art education with a particular focus on the question of decolonialism. In the era of the globalised art world, when world-wide norms of practice (the biennial, the white cube, the artist's residency, the art fair) and a competitive economy of higher arts education providers have been established, this volume challenges the conventional frameworks for thinking about critical art education. The book takes its title from the widely recognised phenomenon of the last two decades whereby artistic and curational practices adopted pedagogical frameworks for the realisation and production of art (the Educational Turn) and asks how the formally instituted practices for the education of artists now operate in the wake of this critical reconstruction of education within art practice itself. At a time when the global discussion of critical educational practice is overshadowed by neoliberal assaults on public culture, After the Educational Turn seeks to inform the future development of art educational praxis drawing upon the project of decolonialism. Decolonialism challenges the political, social and cultural domination established through the Eurocentric construction of knowledge and practice, and seeks to produce emancipatory paradigms of knowledge by drawing upon multiple cultural traditions and the concrete project of decolonisation operative for several centuries throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Drawing upon the cross-fertilisation of experimental artistic practice, critical pedagogy and decolonialism, this volume provides a resource for the next generation of critical arts pedagogies and reclaims an emancipatory role for art education.

Critical Art Pedagogies and Decolonialism

After the Educational Turn

Stephen Wilson

Malcolm Quinn

Michael Lehnert

Carol Tulloch

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section on ‘Taste and art’, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ‘good taste’, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ‘Taste making and the museum’ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ‘Taste after Bourdieu in Japan’ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ‘good taste’, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ‘Taste, the home and everyday life’ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ‘good taste’ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ‘after Bourdieu’. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making.

Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu

The Persistence of Taste

This book provides a new history of the changing relationship between art, craft and industry focusing and a new political theory of the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, nonalienated labour and unwaged labour.

On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art

Art and Labour

Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's economics. Key debates in classical, neoclassical and Marxist theories of art are subjected to an exacting critique. The book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.

Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics

Art and Value

The rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker.Art and Postcapitalism argues that art remains essential for thinking about the intersection of labour, capitalism and postcapitalism not insofar as it merges work and pleasure but as an example of noncapitalist production. Revisiting debates about art and technology, Dave Beech challenges the aesthetics of labour in John Ruskin and William Morris and sheds light on the anti-work theory of Silvia Federici, André Gorz, Kathi Weeks and Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as the technological Cockayne of Srnicek and Williams and Paul Mason.Formulating a critique of contemporary postcapitalism, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the real and imagined escape routes from capitalism.

Dave Beech

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