Going Public
Boris Groys
If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Powerand The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art—which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place.
Boris Groys (1947, East Berlin) is Professor at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Design, Karlsruhe. He is the author of many books, including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, The Communist Postscript, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction: Poetics vs. Aesthetics
The Obligation to Self-Design
The Production of Sincerity
Politics of Installation
The Loneliness of the Project
Comrades of Time
The Weak Universalism
Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies
Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Immortal Bodies