Hito Steyerl
Duty Free Art
London, UK: Verso Books, 2017
256 pp., 14.73 x 2.54 x 21.84 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown
In Duty Free Art - written before Covid19 and George Floyd's murder - Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.
Subtitled Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, the collection of essays asks other pertinent questions, too:
How do we respond to the fact that the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market? What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museum exhibitions? Are we able to distinguish between actual information and the constant digital white noise? Is agency still possible? How can art disrupt rather than reinforce?
In Duty Free Art, Steyerl - perhaps the most engaging writer among visual artists - explores subjects as diverse as corporate surveillance, video games, WikiLeaks, the origins of spam, the proliferation of freeports, and military 3D imaging.
Like her public lectures, these texts are whip-smart, dense, barbed and witty.
“Steyerl refuses to nail down a single idea or insist on a point of view. Instead, we get art—her video—as an act of moral thinking-in-progress. In a very of-the-moment, digital-age way, the logic of that thinking is fractured, the nature of morality suspect. But a belief in the necessity of thinking, restlessly, politically, never is in doubt.”
—New York Times
“Steyerl’s art is extremely rich, dense and rewarding … With Steyerl, you can’t always tell fact from fabulation, where the jokes end and seriousness begins, what is truth and what is a lie. A pleasure in art can unhinge us in everyday life, where we are undone by falsehoods at every turn.”
—Adrian Searle, Guardian
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