1989
A01=Octavian Esanu
Antipolitics
Author_Octavian Esanu
Category=AGA
Category=NHTB
Contemporary art
Eastern Europe
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
George Soros
Karl Popper
Neoliberalism
Postsocialism
SCCA network
Soros Centers for Contemporary Art
Product details
- ISBN 9781526158000
- Weight: 581g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 23 Nov 2021
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The postsocialist contemporary joins a growing body of scholarship debating the definition and nature of contemporary art. It comes to these debates from a historicist perspective, taking as its point of departure one particular art programme, initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. First implemented in Hungary, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) expanded to another eighteen ex-socialist countries throughout the 1990s. Its mission was to build a western ‘open society’ by means of art. This book discusses how network managers and artists participated in the construction of this new social order by studying the programme’s rise, evolution, impact and broader ideological and political consequences. Rather than recounting a history, its engages critically with ‘contemporary art’ as the aesthetic paradigm of late-capitalist market democracy.
Octavian Esanu is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Curator of AUB Art Galleries
