"Mobility" Author: [Germany] Boris Groys Translator: Hertha Publishing House: Chongqing University Press

-Editor's Recommendation-

○ As democracy and equality become more popular, the museum system that preserves old art is under heavy attack.

Why are some things privileged by museums called works of art by us and carefully protected and preserved by our society, while others are left to the destructive forces of time, with no one caring about their eventual disintegration and disappearance?

● Art resists the flow of time VS Art enters the flow of time

In the past, people used art to put the flow of active life on hold and take time to contemplate images. However, if we today push artworks into the torrent of time and make their fate no different from other ordinary things, can we still talk about art?

○ The Rheology of Art: Top art theorists’ insights into art in the Internet age

In our era, museums are no longer places for permanent collections, the Internet has become the main place for the production and dissemination of works of art (practice), and more people discuss art as a mobile thing. Today, art in motion on the Internet can be better documented and preserved than ever before.

-Content Introduction-

In the early 20th century, art and its institutions were criticized in the new spirit of democracy and equality. The idea that a work of art was sacred was rejected, and it was subsequently understood as little more than an object. This was an attack on realism and the traditional protective mission of museums. The acclaimed art theorist Boris Groys argued that this situation led to the development of "direct realism": art that does not produce objects but practices that do not survive (from performance art to relational aesthetics). But more than a century later, every advance in this direction has quickly led to new ways of preserving the uniqueness of art.

In this important work, Groys charts the paradox of this tension, exploring art in the age of objectless media (the Internet). If mechanical reproduction gives us objects without aura, Groys asserts, digital reproduction generates auras without objects, with all their materiality transformed into signs of the transience of the present.

-Expert Recommendation-

Mobility is not only a tangible record of Boris Groys's acute state of mind when he wrote it, it also foreshadows the incredible journey that readers will take around some of the most ubiquitous cultural structures of our time: museums, archives, the Internet. In illustrating the rheology (or fluidity) of art, each chapter of the book illuminates the new potential of contemporary terms and concepts (such as "activism", "participation", "aestheticization", "contagion", "transgression"). Mobility proposes a refreshing approach to art theory, opening up the possibility that ideas remain fluid when put into practice.

Kate Fowle, former chief curator of the Garage Art Museum in Moscow and former director of MoMA SP1 in New York

Most writing about the intersection between contemporary art and contemporary life tends to succumb immediately to the seduction of fashionable presentism or slowly but inevitably to the sentimentality of a lost modernism. Not so with Groys’s essays. Mobility tracks over more than a century of complex conversations between art and philosophy, politics, mass media, lifestyle, museums, and, more recently, the internet. Some of the flows discussed are familiar, but most are not: from the Russian avant-garde around 1917 to the subsequent Gesamtkunstwerk of 1924–1953, from Clement Greenberg to Google, from Martin Heidegger to Julian Assange. Written with Groys’s signature tendency toward offbeat provocations, breathtaking leaps of association, and productive paradoxes, these essays are a challenge and a pleasure to read.

Terry Smith, author of What Is Contemporary Art?

-About the Author-

Boris Groys is a philosopher, art critic, and media theorist. He is a distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University, a senior researcher at Karlsruhe University of Art and Design (HfG), and a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). His representative works include On the New, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, The Total Art of Stalinism, and the critical collections Art Power and Going Public.

-Translator Profile-

Herta, reader, editor, and translator.