Your Everyday Art World
Your Everyday Art Worldis a smart account of the functionality of the art world in the context of information-age capitalism. Relyea's sharp readings of trends, exhibitions, and artworks attend closely to the interweaving of the social and the economic in the art world's 'networked culture' of platforms, flexibility, and mobility, demonstrating how closely its values adhere to those of contemporary neoliberalism.(Frazer Ward, author ofNo Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience)Don't worry: this isn't yet another 'sociology of the art world.' In writing that is conversational in the best -- Socratic -- sense of the term, Lane Relyea offers a compelling analysis of the rise of networked connectivity and DIY agency in contemporary art, and the extent to which they shape our actions as art world denizens.(Sven Lutticken, Assistant Professor, Art History, VU Amsterdam)With prose of galvanizing punch and verve, Lane Relyea details the ways in which the flesh of art responds to the new spirit of capitalism, providing a Benjaminian jolt of homeopathic recognition. At once highly personal and rigorously engaged, this book is a model of committed criticism and a must for anyone committed to the long front of culture -- including to writing well about art.(Judith Rodenbeck, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College; author ofRadical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings)That Relyea manages to build this examination from a wide lens, taking such a sweeping range of information and artists into account, pushes what could be a topic of limited interest into the realm of compelling theory, provocative while resisting any easy conclusions and ultimately finding insights that extend beyond the world of contemporary art.(Publishers Weekly)By locating the effects, tropes and techniques of post-Fordist regimes upon our art worlds, its institutions, and subjects,Your Everyday Art Worldbrings a healthy dose of skepticism to many of the modalities of contemporary agency that artists and art institutions presume and have come to rely upon, perhaps too optimistically. Despite the ways Relyea himself limits the application of this critique, the book offers a strong counterpunch to the neo-entrepreneurial ideology that does indeed shape too many of our institutions and our romanticization of a "network society." As a result,Your Everyday Art Worldis a valuable text that should be taken up, argued over, and made use of.(Ashley HuntX-TRA)