Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of ‘planetarity’ to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

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?