Art and Aesthetics: Verso Student Reading

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

by Anna Kornbluh

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but f...
Paperback

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Disordered Attention

by Claire Bishop

The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated percept...
Hardback

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With and Against

by Dominique Routhier

No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," ...
Paperback

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Civil Imagination

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Translated by Louise Bethlehem

The photograph is not just an image but an event, one in the longer sequence of a photographic moment. Challenging given definitions of photography and of the political, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls...
Paperback

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The Jewelers of the Ummah

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...
Paperback

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Marxist Modernism

by Gillian Rose

Afterword by Martin Jay

Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: ...
Paperback

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Black Meme

by Legacy Russell

In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and co...
Hardback

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Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” In recent decades,...
Paperback

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Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $17.95
Bad New Days

by Hal Foster

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $16.95
Atlas of Emotion

by Giuliana Bruno

Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavour to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures, emphasises that “sight” and “site” but also “motion” ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $49.95
The Choreography of Everyday Life

by Annie-B Parson

In this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance—time, proximity, space, motion and tone— into text. As we follo...
Hardback

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The Emancipated Spectator

by Jacques Rancière

Translated by Gregory Elliott

The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an act...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

by Marshall Berman

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest books on modernity. A kaleidoscopic journey into the experience of modernization, it captures the dizzying social changes...
Paperback

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Glitch Feminism

by Legacy Russell

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...
Paperback

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New Dark Age

by James Bridle

From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically gener...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
Potential History

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $44.95
The Social Photo

by Nathan Jurgenson

The selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo—these new visual forms and the devices and platforms that facilitate them have fomented a cultural revolution. Not onl...
Paperback

Preorder Sale price $19.95
This book will be shipped when it is published on 6 January 2026.
Duty Free Art

by Hito Steyerl

In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the worl...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $17.95
In the Mind But Not From There

by Gean Moreno

In the Mind, But Not From There: Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art considers how the Marxian concept of Real Abstraction--originally developed by Alfred Sohn Rethel, and recently updated by Al...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
Postmodernism

by Fredric Jameson

In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a de...
Paperback

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
Allegory and Ideology

by Fredric Jameson

Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contra...
Paperback

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The Ancients and the Postmoderns

by Fredric Jameson

High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson’s major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting (Rubens) and music...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $34.95
The Antinomies of Realism

by Fredric Jameson

The Antinomies of Realism is a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it imp...
Paperback

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The Future of the Image

by Jacques Rancière

Translated by Gregory Elliott

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
Modern Times

by Jacques Rancière

In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in mo...
Hardback

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The Intervals of Cinema

by Jacques Rancière

Translated by John Howe

The cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book the acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière relates cinema to literature and theatre. With literature, ...
Paperback

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Aisthesis

by Jacques Rancière

Translated by Zakir Paul

The definitive statement on aesthetics and the history of modernism from one of France's most renowned philosophers. Composed of a series of scenes that defined modernism, Aisthesis takes its reade...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
Savage Messiah

by Laura Grace Ford

Preface by Greil Marcus

Introduction by Mark Fisher

Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Grace Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working c...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $39.95
The Postconceptual Condition

by Peter Osborne

If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, “it is the function of artistic form…to make historical content into a philosophical truth” then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that trut...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
In the Flow

by Boris Groys

In the early 20th century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. In an age of secularism and materialism, artworks would be understood as merely...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
Supercommunity

by E-Flux

“I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde

by John Roberts

Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
The Perpetual Guest

by Barry Schwabsky

The idea of contemporary art sometimes allows us to pretend we have made a clean break with the past. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understand...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
Capital Is Dead

by McKenzie Wark

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capit...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
What Comes After Farce?

by Hal Foster

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order tha...
Hardback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
Sensoria

by McKenzie Wark

As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
Capitalism and the Camera

by Kevin Coleman and Daniel James

Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism...
Paperback

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Culture Strike

by Laura Raicovich

In an age of protest, culture and museums have come under fire. Protests of museum funding (for example, the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (for example, the Whitney...
Paperback

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Monumental Lies

by Robert Bevan

The past is weaponised in culture wars and cynically edited by those who wish to impose their ideology upon the physical spaces around us. Holocaust deniers use details of the ruins of the gas cha...
Hardback

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Crisis as Form

by Peter Osborne

Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sid...
Paperback

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Portraits

by John Berger

John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artis...
Paperback

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
Landscapes

by John Berger

Paying homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, John Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist’s eye makes him a storyteller, rather than a...
Paperback

Forthcoming
Investigative Aesthetics

by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman

Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, state violence, environmental destruction and repressive technologies. At the same time, fields not usually associated with aesth...
Paperback

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Heretical Aesthetics

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Preface by T. J. Clark

Edited by Alessandro Giammei and Ara H Merjian

One of Europe's most mythologized Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century, Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet, filmmaker, novelist, and political martyr. He was also a keen critic of painti...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

Sensoria

by McKenzie Wark

As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

What Comes After Farce?

by Hal Foster

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order tha...
Hardback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95

Capital Is Dead

by McKenzie Wark

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capit...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95

Potential History

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $44.95

New Dark Age

by James Bridle

From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically gener...
Paperback (2019)

Add to cart Sale price $16.95

The Social Photo

by Nathan Jurgenson

The selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo—these new visual forms and the devices and platforms that facilitate them have fomented a cultural revolution. Not onl...
Paperback

Preorder Sale price $19.95
This book will be shipped when it is published on 6 January 2026.

In the Mind But Not From There

by Gean Moreno

In the Mind, But Not From There: Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art considers how the Marxian concept of Real Abstraction--originally developed by Alfred Sohn Rethel, and recently updated by Al...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95

Duty Free Art

by Hito Steyerl

In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the worl...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $17.95

Landscapes

by John Berger

Paying homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, John Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist’s eye makes him a storyteller, rather than a...
Paperback

Forthcoming

Postmodernism

by Fredric Jameson

In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a de...
Paperback

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

The Future of the Image

by Jacques Rancière

Translated by Gregory Elliott

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95

Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $17.95

Savage Messiah

by Laura Grace Ford

Preface by Greil Marcus

Introduction by Mark Fisher

Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Grace Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working c...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $39.95

Atlas of Emotion

by Giuliana Bruno

Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavour to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures, emphasises that “sight” and “site” but also “motion” ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $49.95

Aisthesis

by Jacques Rancière

Translated by Zakir Paul

The definitive statement on aesthetics and the history of modernism from one of France's most renowned philosophers. Composed of a series of scenes that defined modernism, Aisthesis takes its reade...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95

The Postconceptual Condition

by Peter Osborne

If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, “it is the function of artistic form…to make historical content into a philosophical truth” then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that trut...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95

Bad New Days

by Hal Foster

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $16.95

In the Flow

by Boris Groys

In the early 20th century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. In an age of secularism and materialism, artworks would be understood as merely...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

Supercommunity

by E-Flux

“I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde

by John Roberts

Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95

The Emancipated Spectator

by Jacques Rancière

Translated by Gregory Elliott

The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an act...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95

The Perpetual Guest

by Barry Schwabsky

The idea of contemporary art sometimes allows us to pretend we have made a clean break with the past. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understand...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

The Ancients and the Postmoderns

by Fredric Jameson

High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson’s major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting (Rubens) and music...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $34.95

See all our recommended Student Reading here.

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