What’s the Use? | Culture Commons Quest Office

Essays tackling an age-old question: Can art change the world?

Is art only art insofar as it refuses to be useful? At a moment when the boundaries between public and private have been radically redrawn—politically, economically and culturally—how do we understand art’s ability to know the world, to develop our ethics, to express our sense of historical belonging and to be, in different ways to different people, useful? What’s the Use? takes as a starting point the premise that art is best understood in dialogue with the social sphere, and examines how the exchange between art, knowledge and use has historically been set up and played out. Propositional and speculative—and deliberately inconclusive—the theorists and artists included in this volume seek an answer to a familiar question: how can art know, and change, the world?

Contributors: Nick Aikens, Christina Aushana, Zdenka Badovinac, Manuel Borja-Villel Tania Bruguera, John Byrne, Jesús Carrillo, Christina Clausen, constructLab, Tamara Díaz Bringas, Georges Didi-Huberman, Charles Esche, Annie Fletcher, Lara Garcia Diaz, Liam Gillick, Melinda Guillen, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Alistair Hudson, Thomas Lange, Li Mu, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Trevor Paglen, Manuel Pelmuş, Emily Pethick, Alexandra Pirici, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Adrian Rifkin, John Ruskin, Lucía Sanromán, Catarina Simão, Sara Stehr, Subtramas, Steven ten Thije, WHW (What, How & for Whom), Stephen Wright, George Yúdice

Editors: Nick Aikens, Thomas Lange, Jorinde Seijdel, Steven ten Thije

Design: George&Harrison