Peripheries are profoundly ambiguous regions. While trying to build a relationship with the center, the periphery often finds itself excluded both on a structural and actor-related level, no matter if the center-periphery model is defined in terms of space or along relations of power.

Calling for a reassessment of the function of art in late capitalist society, Corporate Mentality focuses on the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production inhabits corporate processes, abandoning the autonomy of the artwork in order to elaborate resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns.

Cultures of the Curatorial assumes a curatorial turn in contemporary cultural practice and discourse. Coming from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds, the contributors exemplify the entanglement of theory and practice, consider recent developments within the curatorial field, allow self-reflexive analysis, and explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, economic, political, and regional—under which art and culture become public.

Living Labor considers the increasing subordination of life to work. In response to the eroding boundaries between work and life, and against the historic backdrop of the Scandinavian labor movement, the writers gathered in Living Labor propose viable forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a post-work future.

Masters of Reality brings together the first collection of texts by Steve Rushton exploring the interrelations between art, anthropology, social sciences, psychology, media, politics, and economy. Central to Rushton’s research is an investigation into the conception of feedback, social control, and the culture of “self-performance.”

Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and postmodern thought, renowned German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen compares the abstract and climbing values of artworks with the plunging value of music—a traditionally immaterial art—in order to formulate a broad reflection on the current “crisis of value in the arts.”

As the first significant overview of the work by artist Olivia Plender, this monograph navigates through the evolving attitudes to historical and contemporary forms of communication and education that her research-based practice has explored for the last ten years.

This inter- and trans-disciplinary collection of essays by philosophers, artists, critics, and art historians, reconsiders the place of the aesthetic in contemporary art, with reference to four main themes: aesthetics as “sensate thinking”; the dissolution of artistic limits; post-autonomous practices; and exhibition-values in a global art world.

Myths of the Marble documents a group exhibition that took place in 2017 at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Curated by Alex Klein and Milena Hoegsberg, the exhibition reflects upon how the “virtual” has been engaged by contemporary artists as a way to consider the world as a site of possibility and limitation that both permeates physical space and online experience.

The second in a series on intersubjectivity, this collection of essays considers the relationship between performance, subjectivity, and human agency. Contributions explore the ways in which performance is decoupled from human embodiment via forms of mediation, mechanical reproduction, or simulation.