Ethics of Contemporary Art: In the Shadow of Transgression
- Submitting institution
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Birmingham City University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32Z_OP_A1003
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- ISBN
- 978-1-5013-3990-5
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This monograph challenges a persistent tendency in discussions of contemporary art to venerate artworks that cause scandal, shock and outrage, and presents an alternative vision of what an ethics of contemporary art could look like. It rigorously traces the history of artworks that challenge moral norms, from which it extracts four distinct ‘logics of transgression’, subsequently showing that these logics quickly falter in societies where language, prohibition and morality have become increasingly malleable. Narrating a journey away from transgression, the book provides the blueprint for a new critical paradigm for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art.
In order to do this, the researcher has combined interviews and archival research on artists such as Kader Attia, Artur Zmijewski, and Dora Garcia, with a panoramic literature review of how their work has been received. One of the book’s most original aspects is in how it resists totalizing arguments, carefully thinking alongside artworks and using them to identify a number of diverse relationships between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art. This approach places questions of subjectivity centre-stage, and the researcher pushes this discussion to its rigorous conclusions by assembling a novel theoretical framework that draws on the work of Jacques Lacan and Félix Guattari to solve ethical problems thrown up by the artworks under discussion.
Published in December 2020, the book speaks to a contemporary political moment in which transgressive strategies are as likely to be pursued by individuals in positions of power as those seeking to challenge repressive moral norms. The significance of this book lies in its diagnosis of this contemporary malaise, and in the original roadmap it provides for those who make, study and consume art to move beyond transgression towards an ethics of contemporary art that promotes new values.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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