Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Gregory Sholette, Pluto Press, 2010

Radical Social Production and the Missing Mass of the Contemporary Art World Gregory Sholette (Pluto Press UK, forthcoming, 2009.) The premise of this book is that the formal economy of contemporary art is dependent upon a previously suppressed sphere of informal, non-market, social production involving systems of gift exchange, cooperative networks, distributed knowledge, and collective activities, which is becoming increasingly visible and potentially threatening to the symbolic and fiscal cohesion of high culture, especially in its most politicized form as interventionist art.

“Based on a multitude of examples from the heterocosmos of invisible art practices, Dark Matter is the ultimate companion to contemporary activist art. In his exquisite and theoretically informed style Gregory Sholette investigates the problematic functions of art practices in the processes of neoliberal appropriation, but above all the wild explosive, and deterritorializing lines that are drawn in the dark matter between art and politics. Gerald Runig philosopher, art theorist and author of Art and Revolution.

“With great verve and urgency, Gregory Sholette explores the economics of contemporary art production in an era of neoliberalism, and outlines the promises and pitfalls of various tactics of resistance. Dark Matter is a salient call-to-arms to all cultural laborers.” Julia Bryan-Wilson, art historian and author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era.

“As both active participant and witness Greg Sholette sheds a welcome and overdue light on the dark matter of the so-called art world.” Hans Haacke.

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