Gothic Capitalism (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9789526545929)

As western capitalism outlives any sense of social development or progress, culture takes on an increasingly gothic hue. The ruins of our industrial heyday are illuminated by digital billboards. The cyber-utopianism of the early Internet has waned, exposing Silicon Valley's anti-democratic ideologies and economies. As a result, far-right governments and fascist movements replace our meagre democracies. Looking around there are no saviours. Politics is moribund, while artists, once the dreamers of the modernist avant-garde, have become institutionalized and weak. Our revolutionary dreams are in tatters. Gothic Capitalism argues that artists can salvage art's spiritual and social roots by reassociating our art with working-class communities, class struggle, and gothic capitalism's everyday contradictions.

"Turl's ideas are an incitement, a reckoning - and perhaps even a way forward."

- Holly Lewis, author of The Politics of Everybody

"A vital critique of the extractive machinery of the contemporary art world... this is not just a diagnosis - it's a call to arms.

- Anupam Roy, artist

"At once a protest and a clearing of the path forward... a tour de force of Marxist art history."

- Jyotsna Kapur, author of The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India

"Summons avant-garde artists to break free from a market-driven art world whose institutions permit only capitalist dreams and nightmares -- and to produce art that is truly for the proletariat and its revolution."

- Joe Shapiro, author of The Illiberal Imagination