Art Was Never There: Nostalgia and the Creative Act

Contemporary art is deeply nostalgic, haunted by a time when “in-the-flesh” experiences of it held profound social importance. But did it ever really play such a role? In Art Was Never There: Nostalgia and the Creative Act, Mitch Speed asks whether contemporary art is doomed to become an obsolete curiosity, or if it can act as a site of resistance against an algorithmically driven culture industry that fuels alienation and wreaks havoc on the earth. Traveling through histories of artistic p...