Description
Book SynopsisGrant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in
The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice.
Trade Review“In a superlative demonstration of a hypothesis in action, Grant H. Kester’s definitive study
Beyond the Sovereign Self effectively melts down, then reimagines our stagnated concepts of aesthetic autonomy and avant-gardism in a dauntless bid to retheorize the increasingly entangled, if not indistinguishable, realms of twenty-first-century social activism and art.” -- Gregory Sholette, author of * The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art *
“With characteristic thoroughness, Grant H. Kester articulates the radical potential in challenging the cherished notion of art’s autonomy. Centering dialogic and activist art practices, he insightfully argues that the social labor of cultural resistance necessarily operates in generative forms of collectivity and dissensus.” -- Jennifer A. González, coeditor of * Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1
I. Within and Beyond the Canon
1. The Incommensurablity of Socially Engaged Art 33
2. Escrache and Autonomy 54
II. From Object to Event
3. Dematerialization and Aesthetics in Real Time 85
4. The Aesthetic of Answerability 105
III. A Dialogical Aesthetic
5. Social Labor and Communicative Action 137
6. Our Pernicious Temporality 171
7. Being Human as Praxis 202
Conclusion. Beyond the White Wall 229
Notes 235
Works Cited 255
Index 271
