Anywhere or Not at All: The Philosophy of Contemporary Art

Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.

A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of The Politics of Time

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and founding Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), now at Kingston University London. He is a long-serving member of the editorial collective of the UK journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Conceptual Art and Marx.