Search

'Shaping one's life artistically' implies the principle 'I live as an artist when all my actions, and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remain for me a mere show and assume a shape which is wholly within my power' (Hegel). Drawing on Hegel, the 'young' Marx advocated 'production in accordance with the laws of Beauty' ('artistic work/life'), as a kind of work which, inasmuch as it was 'free', provided a model for the elucidation of the presupposition of human emancipation. 'True Art' appears to be work performed under the umbrella of a 'free community', where the division between masters and slaves, working class and capitalists, emancipators and emancipated, is abolished. Does the conception of 'living artistically' (still) have a critical emancipatory value, and how can it be formulated under the conditions of a global market economy and post-Fordism, where every critical act, event and activity is appropriated? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trump's campaign slogan forces us to ask a simple question: when was America great? Surely, what he has in mind here is the America of the post-war Fordist and Keynesian social welfare models, which saw both the rise of the new suburban middle class and the rise of the white patriarchal figure, the Oedipal agent of the 'father who knows best'. But the coming post-Fordist society has figured the dismantling of the welfare model under the austerity regimes of neoliberalism, at the same time displacing the phallic signifier of paternal authority. Is it possible to bring back white masculine power and the model that made possible the suburban middle class? Or is 'America' the lost object that cuts into the Trumpian imaginary? The American utopia in 'Make America Great Again', is the very nothingness out of which the loss constitutive of Trumpian ideology consists, turning it instead into an American nightmare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief polemic uses the incendiary response to the Innocence of Muslims film trailer as an impetus to explore questions of production value within the creative industries more generally. Released on the internet in the summer of 2012, the video gained widespread attention when it sparked riots across the Muslim world. The author argues that the outrage in response to this incident expressed by Western media, particularly in America, was not over an actual or perceived threat of violence, but over image quality and production value. The article goes on to investigate the way concerns over production value have come to shape recent aspirational film-making and deskilled contemporary art practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]