Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art’s drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state’s biologized control of life. Art’s ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower’s aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life—rendering it bare. This book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state?

The catalogue Ornament and Crime accompanies the group exhibition curated by Meg O’Rourke at Eykyn Maclean gallery in New York. With Adolf Loos’s eponymous 1908 diatribe against excessive ornamentation as its guide, the exhibition draws on the tenets set forth by Loos—simplicity, purity, freedom—with particular attention to their philosophical implications and their persistence into the latter twentieth century.

For almost fifty years, Lydia Okumura has explored the realm of geometric abstraction. She challenges our perception of space through sculptures, installations, and works on paper that blur distinctions between dimensions.

The Brancusi Effect begins with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Cited as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, the exhibition and publication collect Brancusi’s original photographic documentation. The installation reflects the recent currency of the sculptural within contemporary art while referencing Brancusi’s sensibility.

In recent years, debates surrounding the concept of art have focused in particular on installation art, as its diverse manifestations have proven to be incompatible with the modern idea of aesthetic autonomy. Here, Juliane Rebentisch asserts that installation art does not, as is often assumed, dispute aesthetic autonomy per se, and rather should be understood as calling for a fundamental revision of this very concept.