The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919-2009

An innovative history and critical account mapping the ways artists and their works have engaged with, and offered commentary on, modern spectacle in both capitalist and socialist modernism over the past ninety years.

• Focuses on artists whose work expresses the concept of revolutionary social transformation
• Provides a strong historical narrative that adds structure and clarity
• Features a cogent and innovative critique of contemporary art and institutions
• Covers 100 years of art from Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist ‘Monument to the Third International’, to Picasso’s late 1940s commitment to Communism, to the Unilever Series sponsored Large Artworks installed at London’s Tate Modern since 2000.
• Includes the only substantial account in print of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Montreal ‘Bed-in’
• Offers an accessible description and interpretation of Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ theory