Full Description
This smart, provocative book reveals how Useful Art is changing the world.
Does art have to be beautiful? What if it can be useful instead? In this cutting-edge book, John Byrne shows how the concept of 'Useful Art' is helping artists and communities fight back against the neoliberal takeover of our spaces, services and lives.
Byrne demonstrates that networks of artist-led activism and community-based direct action can provide a collaborative playbook of impactful and inclusive alternatives. From Turner Prize-winning urban regeneration projects to bakeries, vegetable gardens and multi-use arts spaces, Useful Art has enormous potential for bringing people together, recovering and preserving local skills and knowledge and reclaiming artistic endeavour for real-world good.
Exploring an international selection of projects, exhibitions and activism, this important new work champions the shift from aesthetics to use value, challenging traditional ways of seeing the world symbolically through art. Reaching beyond the financial logic of the art world, Byrne shows how Useful Art can offer an artistic toolkit for implementing radical change.
Contents
Introduction: is it art and are they artists?
1 Counter-neoliberalism: Useful Art and social change
2 Re-mapping the network: 1:1 scale practice and artistic activism
3 Useful Art and the Useful Museum
4 Useful Art and use value
5 Useful Art and the power of the local
Conclusion: the revolution will be delicious
Postscript
Index
