In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, writer and musician Jörg Heiser argues that context switching between art and pop music is an attempt to solve the contradictions faced in one field of cultural production by moving to another. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop music and art from the early 1960s on, Heiser shows that those leading double lives are often best equipped to detect such contradictions while pointing toward radical alternatives. 

Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalization, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualizing them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows tells the story of those interventions, dwelling on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.

Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others.

This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza’s course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can’t work like this.”

Martin Herbert’s The Uncertainty Principle is a collection of essays that reveals layers of unknowing and open-endedness within a diversity of contemporary art practices since the 1970s.