Stuckists are pro contemporary figurative painting with ideas, and anti conceptual art, mainly because of the poverty of its concepts. This book accompanies the first major national exhibition by the Stuckists, held during the third Liverpool Biennial, 2004.

In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the cacophony of voices of such diverse movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Communism, Destructivism, Vorticism, Stridentism, Cannibalism and Stuckism, taking in along the way film, architecture, fashion, and cookery. Artists' manifestos are nothing if not revolutionary. They are outlandish, outrageous, and frequently offensive. They combine wit, wisdom, and world-shaking demands. This collection gathers together an international array of artists of every stripe, including Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Le Corbusier, Picabia, Dalí, Oldenburg, Vertov, Baselitz, Kitaj, Murakami, Gilbert and George, together with their allies and collaborators - such figures as Marinetti, Apollinaire, Breton, Trotsky, Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas. Edited with an Introduction by Alex Danchev

Published on the occassion of the exhibition held at Lauderdale House, Highgate Hill, London, Apr. 19 - May 2, 2011.

Almost without anybody noticing, a new cultural paradigm has come center stage, displacing an exhausted and increasingly marginalised postmodernism. Dr. Alan Kirby calls this cultural paradigm digimodernism, a name comprising both its central technical mode and its privileging of the fingers and thumbs in its use. The increasing irrelevancy of postmodernism requires a new theory to underpin our current digital culture.

The last few decades have been among the most dynamic within recent British cultural history. Artists across all genres and media have developed and re-fashioned their practice against a radically changing social and cultural landscape – both national and global. This book takes a fresh look at some of the themes, ideas and directions which have informed British art since the later 1980s through to the first decade of the new millennium. In addition to discussing some iconic images and examples, it also looks more broadly at the contexts in which a new ‘post-conceptual’ generation of artists, those typically born since the late 1950s and 1960s have approached and developed aspects of their professional practice. Contemporary British Art is an ideal introduction to the field. To guide the reader, the book is organised around genres or related practices – painting; sculpture and installation; and film, video and performance. The first chapter explores aspects of the contemporary art market and some of the contexts within which art is made, supported and exhibited. The chapters that discuss various genres of art practice also mention books that may be useful to support further reading. Extensively illustrated with a wide range of work (both known, and less well-known) from artists such as Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Anthony Gormley, Jack Vettriano, Sam Taylor-Wood, Steve McQueen and Tracey Emin, and many more.

The theme of 'disinterest' is a dominant one in philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and, unlike many philosophical themes, it has had and continues to have a huge effect, on presuppositions about the nature of judgment, of feeling, of art, of resistance, of all of those experiences and activities that appear to operate at least partly outside of the given regulations of human existence. The Art Kettle has two aims: first, to show that 'modern' art - that is, art during and since the Enlightenment - is not only itself defined by 'disinterest,' by dearth of purpose, but functions as a standard for creativity, for free thinking, for choice, for indulgence, for questioning, and for protest, that suits very well the requirement, in our capitalist democracies, that differences and resistances expend themselves without effect on the combination of conservatism and consumption that supports these democracies; second, to show that the historical conflation of aesthetic experience and 'disinterest' is subject to resistance from another historical conflation: of aesthetic experience and use or purpose.