Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art

With contributions from artists, theorists and activists, among them David Graeber, Brian Holes and Geert Lovink, Future Publics reflects on the emergence of radically new publics whose origins in moments of social crisis and political uncertainty inspire them to question existing forms of collective organization, decision-making structures and protocols. These future publics recognize that following the collapse of late capital's certitudes, the institutions of political and cultural life cannot continue as usual. Utopian yet pragmatic, insurgent yet self-critical, they resist normalization into restrictive definitions of citizenship, cutting across conventional lines of class, region, ethnicity and ideological affiliation. This reader explores how the imaginative and intellectual labor of these new publics has proposed new speculative forms of belonging and collaboration beyond the ones envisaged within the paradigm of contemporary art.