What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of “neurocurating,” in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity. In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

Leading artists, theorists, and writers exhume the dystopian and utopian futures contained within the present “I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software.” Invited to exhibit at the 56th Venice Biennale, e-flux journal produced a single issue over a four-month span, publishing an article a day both online and on site from Venice. In essays, poems, short stories, and plays, artists and theorists trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life, in which art, the internet, and globalization have shed their utopian guises but persist as naked power, in the face of apocalyptic ecological disaster and against the claims of the social commons. “I convert care to cruelty, and cruelty back to care. I convert political desires to economic flows and data, and then I convert them back again. I convert revolutions to revelations. I don’t want security, I want to leave, and then disperse myself everywhere and all the time.”

A massive, long-overdue retrospective on the multimedia image critique of Hito Steyerl, influential artist and author of Duty-Free Artand The Wretched of the Screen Over the past 30 years, through video and installation, the immensely influential German artist and writer Hito Steyerl (born 1966) has been tracking the ways that images have mutated--from the analogue image and its manifold possibilities for montage to the fluidity of the split digital image--and the implications these mutations have had for the representation of wars, genocides and the flow of capital. "We are no longer dealing with the virtual but with a confusing and possibly alien concreteness that we are only beginning to understand," writes Brian Kuan Wood of the digital visual worlds that the artist presents. At nearly 500 pages, this book--the first substantial overview on Steyerl--looks at multimedia installations and film projects of the past ten years, as well as earlier works, all of which are united by the artist's unflagging interrogation of the politics of the image.

"A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard"--

This is an art book which highlights the possibility of using natural, organic materials as art supplies and inspiration.