Writings on Art and Politics

To the philosopher Boris Groys, everything technology produces in the modern world ultimately falls into two categories - either it's art, or it's garbage. Both are useless, defunctionalized objects that simply? lie there. The difference between them comes when we immunize art from the destructive power of time to which we devoutly deliver our garbage. In this collection of essays and interviews, Groys expounds on these paradoxes, taking in art, the dialectic of work, the afterlife, politics, utopia, philosophy, faith, revolution, the avant-garde and digitalization. Boris Groys' philosophical writings critique the political economy of heterotopia: economic resources are finite and not everything in modernity receives the same degree of care. His writings on art concern the things of the afterlife, with only the politics of immortality promising that one's own form of life never perishes in the garbage pit. Groys sees the history of class struggle as a history of aestheticization defined by the forms spectators recognize as valuable enough to preserve, and fight to the death maintaining from disappearance and nonexistence. Western civilization's tendency to aestheticize politicizes everything, including the Anthropocene and all of the "exotic" species dwelling within it. If we can design ourselves as artworks worthy of admiration and care, then can we too survive the ravages of time? Bringing together previously unpublished texts, newly translated work and interviews, this is a coruscating trip through the complex and challenging philosophical and cultural problems that Boris Groys has made it his life's work to deal with.