Title first published in 2003. What happened to art in Britain when the balance began to shift from public to private subsidy following the IMF crisis in 1976? In this polemical book, Neil Mulholland charts the political and cultural shifts in art in Britain from the mid-1970's to the end of the twentieth century. His account covers the key trends and artists of this extraordinarily diverse period, including critical postmodernism, feminism, neoconservatism, object sculpture, the new image, Brit Art, and Scottish neoconceptualism, and traces the development of critical thinking from the opinions of critics such as Richard Cork, John Roberts and Matthew Collings to tabloid press art scandals. The Cultural Devolution offers a broad critical and historical framework within which to understand public debate on the merits of young British artists such as Damien Hirst while looking beyond such celebrities to re-discover the wealth and range of work produced. Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art in Britain.

This book proposes 'paragogic' methods to re-imagine the art academy. While art schooling was revolutionised in the early 20th century by the Bauhaus, the author argues that many art schools are unwittingly recycling the same modernist pedagogical fashions. Stagnating in such traditions, today's art schools are blind to recent advances in the scholarship of teaching and learning. As discipline-based education research in art eternally battles the perceived threat of epistemicide, transformative educational practices are rapidly overcoming the perennialism of the art school. The author develops critical case studies of open source and peer-to-peer methods for re-imagining the art academy (para-academia) and andragogy (paragogy). This innovative book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of the art school, as well as how the art academy can be reimagined and rebuilt.

"In this speculative venture avatars and scenarios proliferate and spin out as redundant probe-heads from the central processing machine that is Capital. Indeed, such a book as this accelerates the process. Here one finds characters composed of advertising refrains and slogans, cruising the mediascape, guided by a telematics standardization that manifests itself in brands and slogans, fast-food outlets and jousting tournaments. This book speaks of consumers and commodities that move at a pace which outruns the regulative speeds of the market, but that also move slower. Is this the future of Capital? If it is, then it is also its past. A court sub specie aeterni." Simon O'Sullivan Neomedievalisms are cultural practices that breathe a bouquet of premoderns as permanent rehearsals of coming events. Where medievalists may be prone to police the post-medieval weald for 'inauthentic' medievalisms, neomedievalists embrace the articulation and mobilisation of metahistorical 'anachronisms'. To the medievalist, medievalisms provide powerful indexes that reveal how post-medieval societies have variously imagined 'little middle ages' to suit modern agendas. To the neomedievalist, medievalisms are theory-fictions that facilitate ludic speculation on non-modern futurities. While neomedievalist theories have emerged in a variety of fields since the early 1970s - notably in cultural studies of medievalisms, international relations and literary theory - there are few applications that synthesise and put the methodologies of these diverse fields into practice. thN Lng folk 2go applies this extant scholarship as an extradisciplinary practice, dramatising the neomedieval turn in (quasi)objects, persons, work, education, travel, food, ethnicity, media, art, hypereconomics and technology. This speculative journey is ghost authored by a trinity of neomedievalist narrators - Journeyman, Anchorite and Host - each relic-ing their own curious neomedieval futurities. Drawing its heterogeneous approaches from studies in medievalisms, international relations, literary theory, actor-network theory, anthropology, hypereconomics, art history, aesthetics, ecology, cultural theory, cultural geography, ambience, speculative realism and future studies - thN Lng folk 2go is both an investigation of and a benefaction to a murmuration of neomedievalisms. thN lng flk 2go iz an boke in fif bokes: I. L'Amerique Souterraine Dis earste dale speketh iter pro peregrinis ad metro. Dis boc iz todealet in fif leasse bokes ov journie-men Gambini's 2 doze hu Lng 2 g0. Iz earste riwle ant ov swucche thinges az duble homo-feaste, drunch ant werke, ant iz ov othre (dug-heids) ant quazi-thinges. II. Imperium et Sacerdotium Dis other dale speketh ov nuncii ant procuratores, ov assemblies ant crusades. III. The Journeyman's Guide to Anchoritism Dis thridde dale iz'ov translatione corporis. Dis dale iz ov customz, liturgica, blak noiz, ant self-discipline ov d post-homo man-thinge. Dis boc iz todealet in thri leasse bokes ov ancre's wittes. IV. xyzzy: Contemporary Art Before and After Britain Dis feorthe dale iz'ov beatific ant ov swucche thinges az doth come from the eye's arrows. Ad te levavi. V. When Transfiguration Became Commonplace Dis fifte dale speketh ov host. Dis dale is al of the thridde riwle, wen translatione bcAM hyper-economicus.