After the Great Refusal offers a Western Marxist reading of contemporary art focusing on the continued presence (or absence) of the avant-garde’s transgressive impulse. Taking art’s ability to contribute to a potential radical social transformation as its point of departure, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen' analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, including relational aesthetics and interventionist art, new institutionalism and post-modern architecture. '...a trenchant critique of neoliberal domination of contemporary art.' Gene Ray, author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

Thomas Wheatland examines the influence of the Frankfurt School, or Horkheimer Circle, and how they influenced American social thought and postwar German sociology. He argues that, contrary to accepted belief, the members of the group, who fled oppression in Nazi Germany in 1934, had a major influence on postwar intellectual life.

Signs of the Time is an investigation into contemporary art theory and the philosophy of art from 1945 till postmodernism. The author treats important precursors such as Freud and Marx, and contemporary theorists and philosophers such as Gombrich, Lacan, Heidegger, Sartre, Althusser, Marcuse, Gadamer, Derrida, Eco, Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. Various texts are discussed, criticized and related to movements in contemporary art and to contemporary artists. The author addresses students in the field of art history, communica-tions, aesthetics, art education, art history, communications, aesthetics, as well as the art lover. Art as a sign of the time reveals the hidden dimensions of the world in which we live.