Seeing Power Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century

A significant meditation on political art and the politics of art by the country’s most celebrated young curator A fog of information and images has flooded the world: from advertising, television, radio, and film to the information glut produced by the new economy. With the rise of social networking, even our contemporaries, peers, and friends are all suddenly selling us the ultimate product: themselves. Here curator and critic Nato Thompson interrogates the implications of these developments for those dedicated to socially engaged art and activism. How can anyone find a voice and make change when the world is flooded with images and information? And what is one to make of the endless machine of consumer capitalism, which has appropriated much from the history of art and, in recent years, the methods of grassroots political organizing and social networking? Highlighting the work of some of the most innovative and interesting artists and activists working today, Thompson reads and praises sites and institutions that empower their communities to see power and re-imagine it. From cooperative housing to anarchist infoshops to alternative art venues, Thompson shows that many of today’s most innovative spaces operate as sites of dramatic personal transformation. From the Trade Paperback edition.

NATO THOMPSON is a writer and curator whose work primarily focuses on the intersection of art, politics, and the city. He has curated numerous large-scale exhibitions and projects both at the public arts institution Creative Time, where he is chief curator, and as a Curator at MASS MoCA. He is the editor of The Interventionists: A Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, and author of Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House), and Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History. He lives in Philadelphia.