Art and Multitude: Nine Letters on Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour

Antonio Negri

ISBN 10: 0745649009 / ISBN 13: 9780745649009

Published by Polity, 2011

About this Item

xiii, 123 pages ; 19 cm. Summary:"Nine letters on art, written to friends from exile in France in the 1980s. Starting from earlier materialist approaches to art, Negri relates artistic production to the structures of social production characteristic of each historical era. This enables him to define the nature of both material and artistic production in the era of post-modernity and post-Fordism - the era Negri characterizes as that of immaterial labour. Negri then seeks to define artistic beauty in this new era, and this he does in terms of concepts that have become fundamental to his thinking - singularity, multitude, abstraction, collective work, event, the biopolitical, the common. Art is living labour, and therefore invention of singularity, of singular figures and objects. But this expressive act only achieves beauty when the signs and language through which it expresses itself turn themselves into community, when they are contained within a common project. The beautiful is not the act of imagining, but an imagination that has become action. Art, in this sense, is multitude. Twenty years later Negri wrote a new text, 'Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour', which synthesizes these elements into a single exposition, and this text forms the concluding chapter of this book"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of cover.

Seller Inventory # 5BR55

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Art and Multitude: Nine Letters on Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour
• Publisher: Polity
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745649009
• ISBN 13: 9780745649009
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Art
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

Nine letters on art, written to friends from exile in France in the 1980s. Starting from earlier materialist approaches to art, Negri relates artistic production to the structures of social production characteristic of each historical era. This enables him to define the nature of both material and artistic production in the era of post-modernity and post-Fordism - the era Negri characterizes as that of immaterial labour.

Negri then seeks to define artistic beauty in this new era, and this he does in terms of concepts that have become fundamental to his thinking - singularity, multitude, abstraction, collective work, event, the biopolitical, the common. Art is living labour, and therefore invention of singularity, of singular figures and objects. But this expressive act only achieves beauty when the signs and language through which it expresses itself turn themselves into community, when they are contained within a common project. The beautiful is not the act of imagining, but an imagination that has become action. Art, in this sense, is multitude.

About the Author

Antonio Negri, Formerly Professor of State Theory, Padua University

Translated by Ed Emery