The Routledge Companion To Art And Activism In The Twenty First Century

The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century brings together a wide range of geographical, cultural, historical, and conceptual perspectives in a single volume of new essays that facilitate a deeper understanding of the field of art activism as it stands today and as it looks towards the future. The book is a resource for multiple fields, including art activism, socially engaged art, and contemporary art, that represent the depth and breadth of contemporary activist art worldwide. Contributors highlight predominant lines of inquiry, uncover challenges faced by scholars and practitioners of activist art, and facilitate dialogue that might lead to new directions for research and practice. The editors hope that the volume will incite further conversation and collaboration among the various participants, practitioners, and researchers concerned with the relationship between art and activism. The audience includes scholars and professors of modern and contemporary art, students in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate programs, as well as artists, curators, and museum professionals. Each chapter can stand on its own, making the companion a flexible resource for students and educators working in art history, museum studies, community practice/socially engaged art, political science, sociology, and ethnic and cultural studies.

These collected chapters and interviews explore the current issues and debates about how copyright will or should adapt to meet the practices of 21st-century creators and internet users. The book begins with an overview of copyright law basics. It is organized by parts that correspond to creative genres: Literary Works, Visual Arts, Fine Art, Music, Video Games and Virtual Worlds, Fashion, and Technology. The chapters and interviews address issues such as copyright ownership in work created by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the musical remix market, whether appropriation is ever a fair use of a copyrighted work or if it is always theft, and whether internet- based platforms should do more to deter piracy of creators’ works. Each part ends with an essay explaining the significance of one or two landmark or trendsetting cases to help the reader understand the practical implications of the law. Written to be accessible to both lay and legal audiences, this unique collection addresses contemporary legal issues that all creators need to understand and will be essential reading for artists, designers, and musicians as well as the lawyers who represent them.

In our chaotic world of co-opted imagery, does art still have power? A fog of images and information permeates the world nowadays: from advertising, television, radio, and film to the glut produced by the new economy and the rise of social media . . . where even our friends suddenly seem to be selling us the ultimate product: themselves. Here, Nato Thompson—one of the country’s most celebrated young curators and critics—investigates what this deluge means for those dedicated to socially engaged art and activism. How can anyone find a voice and make change in a world flooded with such pseudo-art? How are we supposed to discern what’s true in the product emanating from the ceaseless machine of consumer capitalism, a machine that appropriates from art history, and now from the methods of grassroots political organizing and even social networking? Thompson’s invigorating answers to those questions highlights the work of some of the most innovative and interesting artists and activists working today, as well as institutions that empower their communities to see power and reimagine it. From cooperative housing to anarchist infoshops to alternative art venues, Seeing Power reveals ways that art today can and does inspire innovation and dramatic transformation . . . perhaps as never before.

Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics is a theoretically informed reconceptualization of museum ethics discourse as a dynamic social practice central to the project of creating change in the museum. Through twenty-seven chapters by an international and interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners it explores contemporary museum ethics as an opportunity for growth, rather than a burden of compliance. The volume represents diverse strands in museum activity from exhibitions to marketing, as ethics is embedded in all areas of the museum sector. What the contributions share is an understanding of the contingent nature of museum ethics in the twenty-first century—its relations with complex economic, social, political and technological forces and its fluid ever-shifting sensibility. The volume examines contemporary museum ethics through the prism of those disciplines and methods that have shaped it most. It argues for a museum ethics discourse defined by social responsibility, radical transparency and shared guardianship of heritage. And it demonstrates the moral agency of museums: the concept that museum ethics is more than the personal and professional ethics of individuals and concerns the capacity of institutions to generate self-reflective and activist practice.

This multidisciplinary companion offers a comprehensive overview of the global arena of public art. It is organised around four distinct topics: activation, social justice, memory and identity, and ecology, with a final chapter mapping significant works of public and social practice art around the world between 2008 and 2018. The thematic approach brings into view similarities and differences in the recent globalisation of public art practices, while the multidisciplinary emphasis allows for a consideration of the complex outcomes and consequences of such practices, as they engage different disciplines and communities and affect a diversity of audiences beyond the existing 'art world'. The book will highlight an international selection of artist projects that illustrate the themes. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, urban studies, and museum studies.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics offers a thorough examination of the complex relationship between art and politics, and the many forms and approaches the engagement between them can take. The contributors - a diverse assembly of artists, activists, scholars from around the world – discuss and demonstrate ways of making art and politics legible and salient in the world. As such the 32 chapters in this volume reflect on performing and visual arts; music, film and new media; as well as covering social practice, community-based work, conceptual, interventionist and movement affiliated forms. The Companion is divided into four distinct parts: Conceptual Cartographies Institutional Materialities Modalities of Practice Making Publics Randy Martin has assembled a collection that ensures that readers will come away with a wider view of what can count as art and politics; where they might find it; and how it moves in the world. The diversity of perspectives is at once challenging and fortifying to those who might dismiss political art on the one hand as not making sufficient difference and on the other to those embracing it but seeking a means to elaborate the significance that it can make in the world. The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics brings together a range of issues and approaches and encourages critical and creative thinking about how art is produced, perceived, and received.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today’s writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?" To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords: Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real) Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee) Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed) Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules) Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation) Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda) End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy) Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this). These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre. Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.

Art museums today face the challenge of opening themselves up as institutions to a changing society. This publication offers new perspectives on museological trends that are developing in various countries and cultures. Through increasingly flexible, inclusive and unexpected museum typologies, institutions aim to give their visitors greater access to art. The essays define the role of the museum as a medium of social change, as a protagonist in an education process and as a technologically innovative platform. Art historians, but also practitioners from the museum world – including curators, architects and psychologists – examine what is expected of art museums using case studies and against the background of the humanities and social sciences.

Drawing on 20 years of ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, Brazil and India, this book highlights the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance.

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.