John C. Welchman’s compelling study reassesses Italian Futurism; the words and images in Dada and Surrealism; affect in the work of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger; the delirious splits and metaphorical ricochets of Salvador Dalí; the social and philosophical ideas mobilized by René Magritte; “whiteness” in the work of Günter Brus; postwar US–UK exchanges on sculpture; and relations between writing and seeing in the work of Rémy Zaugg.

Since the mid-1990s, contemporary art has been booming like never before. There is more of everything—more artists, more collectors, more galleries, more art fairs, more museums, more biennials … with one exception: criteria with which the art of the moment can be understood, judged, praised and, if need be, damned.

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.

This collection of essays does not aim to illustrate a prefabricated theory of art, but rather follows the impulses given by artworks themselves. Philosopher and art critic Boris Groys writes about significant artists and artworks of the last century that have pushed his thinking and writing in a new direction.

One of the few things we have in common in contemporary society is the future of our children. But it seems that even the “we” of childhood has turned into a common ground for instrumentalization and competition. What happened to the reform pedagogy of the twentieth century? What is the status of childhood in the era of the consuming child and the playing adult? These are some of the questions addressed by this book.