The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity―a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview.

Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Groys, Boris

Arts & Photography

Columbia University Press

History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (Mit Press)

An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of “unofficial” artists in Moscow―artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences―created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian avant-garde.
The book collects Groys's essays on Moscow conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group―including Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov―became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow Conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the cold war.

History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought before the public in two ways -- as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function. Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today's mainstream Western art -- which he finds behaving more and more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself -- by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of the modern artwork.

Art Power

MIT Press]

A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of art's complex relationship to power.
Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought before the public in two ways―as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function.
Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today's mainstream Western art―which he finds behaving more and more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself―by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of the modern artwork.

Art Power (Mit Press)

An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde.In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of “unofficial” artists in Moscow―artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences―created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian avant-garde.The book collects Groys's essays on Moscow conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group―including Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov―became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow Conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the cold war.

The MIT Press

The first fully illustrated survey of participatory art and its key practitioners, published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
This new survey covers the rich and varied history of participatory art, from early happenings and performances to current practices that demand audience interaction. As the hallmarks of Web 2.0--browsing, sharing, collecting, producing--increasingly permeate every aspect of society, this timely project reveals the ways in which artists and viewers have approached the creation of open works of art. The featured artists include Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Janet Cardiff, Lygia Clark, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Allan Kaprow, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Antoni Muntadas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Erwin Wurm.
Original essays by Rudolf Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins, and Lev Manovich identify seminal moments in participatory practice from the 1950s to the present day. A rich array of plates introduce work by all the artists in the accompanying exhibition, with reproductions of significant projects by other major figures--from Helio Oiticica, Joan Jonas, and Gordon Matta-Clark to Rirkrit Tiravanija and SUPERFLEX--rounding out the survey.

The Art of Participation

Manovich, Lev

Atkins, Robert

Frieling, Rudolf

Reference

Thames&Hudson

As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists' demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single "artistic" whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an "art for the masses." Groys argues instead that the "total art" proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin's death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing "sots art," a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.

The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond

Princeton University Press

After spending some thirty years as an 'unofficial' artist behind the Iron Curtain of the former Soviet Union, Ilya Kabakov first came to the attention of the West in the 1980s. Today Kabakov is recognized as the most important Russian artist to have emerged in the late 20th century, with installations that speak as much about conditions in post-Stalinist Russia as they do about the human condition universally. His installations are, in some instances, akin to theatrical mise-en-scenes, reproducing a cramped communal apartment or a flooded art museum as a site of Schadenfreude-like comedies on human frustration and doomed aspirations. Alternating between light-hearted irony and genuine tragedy, Kabakov evokes a shadowy world lit by a twenty-watt bulb in which fable-like miracles might occur: a homespun cosmonaut may fly into space, or the radio/television aerial may spell out a poem against the sky. Ilya Kabakov's work has featured in the world's most significant surveys of contemporary art, among them Documenta IX (Kassel, Germany, 1992), and the Whitney Biennial (New York, 1997). In 1993 Kabakov represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale.

Ilya Kabakov (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Blazwick, Iwona

Ross, David A.

Phaidon Press

Jeff Wall is foremost among the artists who since the late 1960s have brought photography to the forefront of contemporary art. This revised and expanded edition of the definitive monograph on the Canadian artist, first published in 1996, includes a new fully illustrated essay on Wall's recent work by the French historian of art and photography Jean-François Chevrier, in addition to the artist's recent writings. Describing himself as 'a painter of modern life', Wall produces huge transparencies mounted onto light boxes which diffuse a brilliant glow through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations. These images employ the latest technology to create tableaux which are evocative of subjects ranging from Hollywood cinema to nineteenth-century history painting. When installed they evoke both the seduction of the cinema screen and the physical presence of minimalist sculptures. Wall engages at a sophisticated level with theories of representation both as an artist and as a theoretical writer on contemporary art and culture. Major surveys of his work have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (1995); the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1996), and the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal (1999).

Jeff Wall (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Chévrier, Jean-François

Duve, Thierry

Pelenc arielle

Jeff Wall establishes photography's place at the forefront of contemporary art. His pictures form a bridge between the painterly conventions of artists such as Velazquez and mass media technologies. This book surveys his entire career to date.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Groys, Boris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Groys, Boris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Groys, Boris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism

Art Power

Art Power (Mit Press)

History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (Mit Press)

The Art of Participation

The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond

Ilya Kabakov (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Jeff Wall (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Jeff Wall (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)