MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
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Weathering a perfect storm of images
Hito Steyerl's book is a worthy but flawed attempt to mediate the negative visual overload of contemporary culture, says NICK WRIGHT
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
ED WAUGH introduces a special event to commemorate the centenary of the 1926 General Strike
Reviews of Charlotte Cornfield, Michael Weston King, and Gun Outfit
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.
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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
The creative imagination is a weapon against barbarism, writes KENNY COYLE, who is a keynote speaker at the Manifesto Press conference, Art in the Age of Degenerative Capitalism, tomorrow at the Marx Memorial Library & Workers School in London
ELIZABETH SHORT recommends a bracing study of energy intensive AI and the race of such technology towards war profits