Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art - Softcover

This long overdue philosophy of contemporary art provides us with the conceptual tools to rethink both the history of contemporary art and the philosophy of art criticism. Impassioned yet analytical, Osborne delivers a politically astute discourse in a prose highly pleasurable for its clarity. It is essential reading for anyone serious about contemporary art - or its philosophy. --Ruth Noack, curator of documenta 12

Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that "contemporary art is postconceptual art," the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.