Vid Simoniti
Vid Simoniti
Books
Artists Remake the World
How can art make an impact on a society in crisis? As an experimental form of politics. Surveying artistic innovations such as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to create bold solutions to the world’s problems in the twenty-first century.
The book is written for the general and scholarly reader alike, and argues for a new critical framework with which to assess political art today.
The books is coming out with Yale University Press in 2023. You can order it here or at most bookstores.
Endorsements:
“An original thinker and masterful prose stylist with a huge, generous mind, Simoniti has written a subtle, courageous meditation on contemporary political art. This book offers us a profound critical reconsideration of the aesthetic resources we bring to the urgent human issues it addresses.” — Adrian Piper, artist and philosopher
“Vid Simoniti elegantly, skilfully unpicks the interfaces where art meets politics. A process that stirs up substantive new material for contemplation.” — Cornelia Parker, artist
Art and Knowledge After 1900
Co-edited with James Fox
This new history of modern art explores the relationship between art and knowledge from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Each chapter examines artistic responses to a particular discipline of knowledge, from quantum theory and theosophy, to cybernetics and ecology.
The thirteen chapters, from some of the leading art historians writing today, offer new perspectives on established topics like painterly abstraction, Surrealism, conceptual art and documentary photography, and elucidate less well-known incursions of art into fields like economics, sociology, cybernetics, biotechnology, climate activism, and ethnic futurisms.
The book has been fully funded by a grant from the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park Foundation in Canada, and is published by Manchester University Press in 2023.
You can order the book here or at most bookstores.