Diversity of Aesthetics
Diversity of Aesthetics
Edited by Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales;
Claire Fontaine, Iman Ganji, Saidiya Hartman, Vicky Osterweil, Andreas Petrossiants, Christina Sharpe, Stevphen Shukaitis, Michael Rakowtiz, Shellyne Rodriguez, Jose Rosales, Rinaldo Walcott
Liberation / Critique / Theory
Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production.
Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis.
Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and riots—militant thinkers, artists, educators, and others discuss aesthetic production, forms of social organization, modes of struggle against gendered and racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory. Common to all three conversations is a commitment to rethinking the relationship between forms of critique and forms of struggle undertaken by collective social practices, offering lessons for tactics, strategies, and practices.
Product Details
ISBN: 9781945335310
Published: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 5.0 x 8.0 in
Page count: 176
Other Formats
ISBN: 9781945335556
Published: June 24, 2025
Format: EPUB
Excerpts
The idea that our complicity robs us of the ability to say anything is bullshit. You can bite the hand that feeds you. In fact, you must bite the hand that feeds you. Are we all okay with normalizing McCarthyism? Is our complicity an extension of white liberal guilt? No! You’re supposed to say something anyway. You have to show up to the employee cafeteria and look at your boss like, “Yeah, that was me outside, how’s your day today?” —Shellyne Rodriguez, Diversity of Aesthetics Vol. 1
There are many ways of seeing what communism could mean, some of which have become clearer today than in the past. At least over the past fifteen years, the idea of communism is no longer that of appropriating the means of production, because the means of production, along with what is being produced, are themselves destroying the planet. So this is already a revolution in the very foundations of the philosophical framework of materialism, which historical communism and the workers movement sought to realize as praxis. But this isn’t a riddle, it was a mistake from the very beginning and remains the structuring blind spot of Marxism and workerist ideologies.—Claire Fontaine, Diversity of Aesthetics Vol. 2
Looting is direct action par excellence. But it is also a nearly irrecuperable aesthetic gesture against the police, whiteness, and the regime of property that gives those forces power and purpose. In revealing the innately ideological and social content of property ownership, in demonstrating that all that stands between us and plenty is a thin sheet of plate glass, looting destabilizes the ideological hold of whiteness, property, and capital, and it has done so since the enslaved looted themselves singly and en masse from the plantation.—Vicky Osterweil, Diversity of Aesthetics Vol. 3
