MATTHEW HAWKINS witnesses a contemporary ballet that represents human life as subjected to artificial intelligence
Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
Hito Steyerl
(Verso £9.99)
IT’S not always the case that art professionals — artists themselves, critics and connoisseurs, historians and theorists — ground their thought and language in the distinctions, connections and contradictions revealed in a materialist scrutiny of the images that they create, consider or curate.
While the idea that the products of cultural work can be studied and understood independently of the circumstances in which they are produced persists, the very speed and complexity of the contemporary and highly mediated world allows little time for the quiet contemplation of classical beauty.
Renewed illusions in social democratic reformism are sprouting as a result of Andy Burnham’s rhetoric, but material conditions are already intruding into the debate, argues NICK WRIGHT
MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
ALAN McGUIRE welcomes a biography of the French semiologist and philosopher



