Osborne Peter. The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays

London: Verso, 2018. — 240 p. — ISBN10: 1786634902; ISBN13: 978-1786634900If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, “it is the function of artistic form … to make historical content into a philosophical truth” then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that truth. Contemporary art makes this work more difficult than ever. Today’s art is a point of condensation for a vast array of social and historical forces, economic and political forms, and technologies of image production. Contemporary art, Osborne maintains, expresses this condition through its distinctively postconceptual form. These essays—extending the scope and arguments of Osborne’s Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art—move from a philosophical consideration of the changing temporal conditions of capitalist modernity, via problems of formalism, the politics of art and the changing shape of art institutions, to interpretation and analysis of particular works by Akram Zaatari, Xavier Le Roy and Ilya Kabakov, and the postconceptual situation of a crisis-ridden New Music.Time of the PresentThe Postconceptual Condition: Or, the Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today
Global Modernity and the Contemporary: Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time
Temporalization as Transcendental Aesthetics: Avant-Garde, Modern, ContemporaryArt and Politics
4 Theorem.4. Autonomy: Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?
Disguised as a Dog: Cynical Occupy?InstitutionsOctober and the Problem of Formalism
Existential Urgency: Contemporaneity, Biennials and Social Form
Archive as Afterlife and Life of ArtArt and ImageThe Distributed Image
Information, Story, Image: Akram Zaatari's Historical Constructivism
Dialectical Ontology of Art: Xavier Le Roy's Retrospective in/as Contemporary Art
The Kabakov Effect: `Moscow Conceptualism' in the History of Contemporary Art
The Terminology is in Crisis: Postconceptual Art and New Music
The Image is the Subject: Once More on the Temporalities of Image and ActAcknowledgements
Image Credits
Index