Synopses & Reviews
Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalized artists, the
"dark matter" of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it.
Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite.
This dependency, and the advent of inexpensive communication, audio and video technology, has allowed this "dark matter" of the alternative art world to increasingly subvert the mainstream and intervene politically as both new and old forms of non-capitalist, public art. This book is essential for anyone interested in interventionist art, collectivism, and the political economy of the art world.
Review
"An important new book that offers a counter-history of the rise of the global art world from the perspective of a politically engaged artist and activist. This book is far more than a conventional art
history; it aspires to be a political economy of creativity under late capitalism...Sholette shows that neoliberalism is 'wholly dependent upon the presence/absence of that which it excludes, an ever-present oversupply of cultural production that is mechanically encircled and expelled.'" --Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism "With great verve and urgency, Gregory Sholette explores the economics of contemporary art production in an era of neoliberalism, and outlines the promises and pitfalls of various tactics of resistance. Dark Matter is a salient call-to-arms to all cultural laborers." -- Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era "Based on a multitude of examples from the heterocosmos of invisible art practices, Dark Matter is the ultimate companion to contemporary activist art. In his exquisite and theoretically informed style Gregory Sholette investigates the problematic functions of art practices in the processes of neoliberal appropriation, but above all the wild explosive, and deterritorializing lines that are drawn in the dark matter between art and politics." -- Gerald Raunig, philosopher and art theorist and author of Art and Revolution "Focusing primarily on the anti-institutional, collective and politically critical artists that often willingly reject the light of the mainstream galleries and academies, Sholette both highlights a vast array of important contributors to art of the last decade and also challenges the ahistorical assumptions that ground the capitalist art market." - Paul B. Jaskot, Professor of Art History, DePaul University "As both active participant and witness Greg Sholette sheds a welcome and overdue light on the dark matter of the so-called art world." -- Hans Haacke, artist “An important and necessary intervention…What's striking about the book is that it is less a set of reflections on 'art and politics' than a critique of art's very place within political economy, something that even erstwhile radicals rarely address….Dark Matter is well placed to shift the debate on art's utility back within the domain of labour and value, where it has long been missing.” -- John Roberts, author of The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade “The book is at once a combination of thesis, research, call to arms and archive, and it is this last function that demonstrates best its importance, by telling the stories of projects that resist the market through invisibility or by mocking its very structures… Dark Matter becomes a much needed archive - one that recognizes the growing presence and power of the ‘dark matter of the art world and also argues for an acknowledgement of the political power of invisibility.” -- Amber Landgraff, CIIO Summer 2011 "Both a history and a theoretically ambitious work, Sholette develops a theory of the mass of artists, mostly not legitimated by the commercial world, as the “dark matter” of culture. Although not honored, their work is necessary for the production of the art that is monetarily valued. Now, in part because of the new technologies, it is becoming more difficult to keep the “dark matter” hidden...Its impossible to do justice to the work in this space, but suffice it to say that this was perhaps my favorite book of the year." - Left Eye On Books, blog "A new publication that seeks to influence today's post-institutional phase change through a reconfiguring of the relationship between art and politics is Gregory Sholette's Dark Matter...Sholette has produced yet another important theoretical intervention in the field of critical art practice....His new book is interesting not only for its sympathetic treatment of a wide array of practices, but particularly for the way that it attempts to make sense of them with the concept of dark matter." - Monthly Review, Jan. 2012 issue
About the Author
Gregory Sholette is an artist, activist and author based in New York. He has been a co-founder of two artists collectives: Political Art Documentation and Distribution (1980-88) and REPOhistory (1989-2000). He has co-edited two books, The Interventionists: Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (2004, with Nato Thompson) and Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (2007, with Blake Stimson). For more information on Gregory Sholette and his work, visit his website: http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/?page_id=502
Table of Contents
Series Preface * Acknowledgments * Exordium: An Accidental Remainder * Introduction: The Missing Mass * 1 Art, Politics, Dark Matter: Nine Prologues * 2 The Grin of the Archive * 3 History that Disturbs the Present * 4 Temporary Services * 5 Glut, Overproduction, Redundancy! * 6 The Unnamable * 7 Mockstitutions * 8 Conclusions: Nights of Amateurs * Notes * Bibliography * Appendix: Artists Group Survey 2008 * Index