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Art and Aesthetics: Verso Student Reading

Our art and aesthetics reading for the academic year ahead, up to 40% off as part of our student reading sale.

Verso Books28 August 2022

Art and Aesthetics: Verso Student Reading

Make your Art and Aesthetics bookshelf as exciting as ours, with books from James Bridle, John Berger, Hito Steyerl, Jacques Rancière, Frederic Jameson, and more.

Student reading sale: ends September 30
30% off if you buy 3 or more titles
40% off if you buy 4 or more titles
Discount will be applied in cart. Separate orders can't be combined.
See all our Student Reading here.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

See all our recommended Student Reading here.

30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$26.95~~ Sale price $18.86
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$26.95~~ Sale price $18.86
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$26.95~~ Sale price $18.86
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$44.95~~ Sale price $31.46
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46
30% off
Black Meme

by Legacy Russell

**Shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Criticism**Representations of Blackness have always been integral to our understanding of of the modern world. In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning auth...
Hardback

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$49.95~~ Sale price $34.96
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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

We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$14.95~~ Sale price $10.46
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$44.95~~ Sale price $31.46
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$17.95~~ Sale price $12.56
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96
30% off
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.
30% off
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

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$34.95~~ Sale price $24.46
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$34.95~~ Sale price $24.46
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$39.95~~ Sale price $27.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96
30% off
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

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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 Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46
30% off
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

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
Monumental Lies

by Robert Bevan

How the past is memorialized can have a dangerous influence on the future. Monumental Lies exposes the truths buried at contested heritage sites and demands that we safeguard the material evidence ...
Hardback

Add to cart Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96
30% off
Portraits

by John Berger

Edited by Tom Overton

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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
Landscapes

by John Berger

Introduction by Tom Overton

Edited by Tom Overton

Landscapes showcases the development and practice of John Berger’s unique way of seeing. Here he surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished his understanding of t...
Paperback

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96
30% off
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

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

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$44.95~~ Sale price $31.46

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$16.95~~ Sale price $11.86

30% off
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

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$17.95~~ Sale price $12.56

30% off
Landscapes

by John Berger

Introduction by Tom Overton

Edited by Tom Overton

Landscapes showcases the development and practice of John Berger’s unique way of seeing. Here he surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished his understanding of t...
Paperback

Add to cart Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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.

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$39.95~~ Sale price $27.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$49.95~~ Sale price $34.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96

30% off
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

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

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$24.95~~ Sale price $17.46

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$29.95~~ Sale price $20.96

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$19.95~~ Sale price $13.96

30% off
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

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

30% off
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 Regular price ~~$34.95~~ Sale price $24.46

Filed under: student-reading, versoreadinglists