Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People)

Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art brings together contributions by artists, theorists, and activists to reflect on radically new publics—forward-looking yet pre-figurative, situated yet nomadic—as they emerge from the experiences of social crisis and political uncertainty that characterize our present. These future publics are provisional assemblies that question existing mechanisms of collective organization and constructions of social value and cultural meaning, recognizing that the institutions of public life cannot continue with a “business-as-usual” attitude as late capital’s certitudes collapse and entrenched regimes are being challenged across the globe. Resisting conscription into formal definitions of citizenship, these publics shape new solidarities that cut across conventional lines of class, region, ethnicity, and ideological affiliation. In the field of art, they demonstrate a renewed, insurgent, and self-critical capacity for engagement, rejecting the passive observation of the “viewer,” the commodifying gaze of the “consumer,” and the stylized participation of the “spectator.” Through these accounts, the contributors assemble a vocabulary relevant to artistic practices and civic conclaves mobilized outside the ossified institutions: among propositions such as rebel citizenry, orgnets, cultural users, stateless states, and devolutionary platforms, they articulate and address ways of being and doing beyond those that have been established within the neoliberal paradigm of “the contemporary.”