Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of “neurocurating,” in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity.

In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.

What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

• Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art
• In the Flow
• Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
• After Art (POINT: Essays on Architecture Book 4)
• Art Power (The MIT Press)
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
• How to Write About Contemporary Art
• Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (The MIT Press)
• The Emancipated Spectator