Episode 385- Useful Art explodes what your sense of Art with a capital "A" is and can be, with John Byrne, author of "Useful Art- How Activist Artists Can Change the World"

John Byrne, author of "Useful Art- How Activist Artists Can Change the World," and professor of Useful Art at Liverpool John Moores University's School of Art and Design, talks about:

The city of Liverpool and its art community, with about 20 total galleries, and how he fits into it; where he'll be book touring the book; a key framing in the book, being in a 'neo-liberal occupation' that we live under, which has a huge impact on the culture industries and means the financialization of essentially everything; the surprising pushback there's been at conferences and other events where Useful Art is discussed, including a lot of resistance from those in the art world who may feel that their positions of power are being threatened; the complex but far too under-considered distinction between "use value" and "aesthetic value," and why it's worth considering "use value" as a legitimate part of art-making (and which can even somehow manage to incorporate some aesthetic value); how one of the things he's interested in is having a radical re-think of what aesthetics are but also what they can be; some among many Useful Art projects, including by individual artist Tania Bruguera and Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, which curated Documenta 15, and how they came to be as a group…and, in turn, what the effect of having Ruangrupa curate that Documenta, which was an adventurous choice of curation, a role that John has heard described as "the curatorial Everest."

In the 2nd half of our conversation, available to Patreon supporters of The Conversation, John Byrne talks about:

how ruangrupa came to be, a very different trajectory as they didn't grow up in a culture with contemporary galleries or museums (though they did go to art schools abroad), but had a goal to make a living as artists through the collective, more specifically the "lumbung," equivalent to a co-operative;  how the controversy that arose from a single figure with a swastika in the much, much broader scope of ruangrupa's curation led to calls of anti-semitism which overshadowed that Documenta from an outsider's and the press's perspective, and how John believes this distraction was used by many as a way of avoiding discussing some of the core meanings and significance of ruangrupa's contributions to the vaunted art event; the importance of "switching the aperture of the Overton Window," a term he mentions several times, which is about re-orienting your settings in terms of shared understandings of what bi