Still: Hito Steyerl's How Not to Be Seen (2013)

The New Manifestos: 6 Artist Texts That Are Defining Today's Avant-Garde

By Ian Wallace

MAY 17, 2014

Once upon a time, you couldn't flip through a European newspaper without coming across the polemical manifesto of a budding avant garde artists' movement. The major movements of the 20th century—Dada, Fluxus, Futurism, Surrealism, Suprematism, and so on—all started with formal statements of intent written by artists, not critics, and often in inflammatory prose. In contrast, today's categories like "conceptual art," "relational aesthetics," "bio art," and "new media" refer to general trends in contemporary art as a whole rather than describing specific groups of artists who are professionally or socially associated with one another. What's more, these terms are more often cooked up by critics than by artists themselves. 

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