There are signs that art critique is trying to reconnect with the critique of reality. Not only does it put the current art production into a broader historical context, it relates its main features and trends to concrete political decisions and historical events. This new sense for historicity is, curiously, accompanied by the critique of art’s own obsession with the past in the variety of its cultural articulations: archives, documents, acts of excavating and unearthing, performative...

Germano Celant has referred to the desire for the unlimited fabrication and widespread distribution of art objects as a “small utopia,” positing it as “a dream that punctuated the twentieth century across myriad historical and aesthetic contexts and moments.” But as much as reproduction offered a utopian promise, it also figured as a threat due to the possibility that it might liquidate historicity and uniqueness. In response to the anxiety provoked by the onslaught of mechanical copies in...

Ever since records began, in every known society, a substantial proportion of the population has reported unusual experiences many of which we would today label as “paranormal”. Opinion polls show that the majority of the general public accepts that paranormal phenomena do occur. Such widespread experience of and belief in the paranormal can only mean one of two things. Either the paranormal is real, in which case this should be accepted by the wider scientific community which currently...

Democracy is an empty word unless it affirms the power of ordinary people to prevail over any form of privileged interest or ruling class. As imposition of 'the will of the people', democracy should be understood as a power of autonomous self-determination, and thus as a capacity to overcome (rather than simply resist) hostile, heteronomous forms of determination. This general capacity, in turn, depends on several mutually reinforcing collective abilities or powers, in particular capacities...

Beheading is in the news. Rarely, however, is it discussed in relation to the long tradition of the severed head and and the history of decapitation in the West. If IS is taken as largely a phenomenon of modernity, then its use beheading as spectacle needs to be considered in this context. This lecture looks at three paradigms of decapitation: the mythic, which goes back to the head of Medusa as a petrifying image; the Christian, focused on St John the Baptist in relation to martyrdom; and...

Radical historian Peter Linebaugh talks about the value of what we hold in common, how it can be threatened by private interests, and the possibilities for resistance. Peter Linebaugh works at the University of Toledo, Ohio. Recorded on 20 October 2014

The presentation discusses the problem of assessing value in art, and of constructing critique. It looks briefly at Marx's theory of labour, followed by a revisitation of post-modern theory, as exemplified by Jean-François Lyotard's 'economic genre' and Jean Baudrillard's 'sign value', and concluding with an understanding of critique as a ways of changing the currency, as found in Michel Foucault's last seminars. Simon Sheikh is a Reader in Art and Programme Director of Curating at...

Dave Beech is an artist in the collective Freee. He teaches Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art

Historians of art and literature since Kant have known about an aspect of the present that is absolutely unlivable because of some excessive nearness to its end. Yet this aspect is also unlived: the moment in which we return to affirm its presence we become truly contemporary. This lecture pursues a trajectory to genuine futurity through episodes illustrative of the capacity to enter into relation with the unthought, unactualized, and unlived. Julia Ng is a lecturer in MA Cultural Studies at...

Lawyer and curator Daniel Maclean focuses his presentation on how the Law underpins the production of economic and symbolic value in Art. In turn, he uses the intersection between Art and Law to reflect upon the Law as a source and representation of value. He examines three categories within this intersection looking at how the Law, defines regulates and protects Art as well as at times conflicts with it: (a) the ownership of art and disputes over ownership; (b) authorship and authentication;...