Written with beautiful clarity, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design asks the contemporary art world to be honest about the pervasive effects of commodification and the difficulty of staging critique. The book examines the collusion of 'art' and 'design' in contemporary artistic practices in order to find avenues of critique in a commercially driven cultural landscape. Grace McQuilten focuses on the work of Takashi Murakami, Andrea Zittel, Adam Kalkin and Vito Acconci, four contemporary artists who claim to be working in the field of design rather than the traditional art world. McQuilten argues that Zittel, Acconci and Kalkin engage with 'design' only to reactivate the critical practice of art in a more direct engagement with capital - and conceives of and affirms a future for art, outside of the art world, as a parasite in the complex beast of late capitalism. This book is an important and timely provocation to a cynical and apathetic consumer culture, and a call to arms for creative freedom and critical thought.

This book analyses the challenges and opportunities faced by art-based social enterprises (ASEs) engaging young creatives in education and training and supporting their pathways to the creative industries. In doing so, it addresses the complex intersecting issues of marginality and entrepreneurship, particularly in relation to young creatives from socially, economically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with twelve key organisations, and three in-depth case studies in Australia, the book offers a detailed analysis of using enterprise to engage with the structural challenges of marginality. The book explores the local and global contexts through which art-based social enterprises (ASEs) operate and within which they attempt - often successfully - to improve access to education and work for emerging creatives. It also attends to the findings generated through engaging with the lived experiences of the staff and young creatives involved in our ASE case studies, in order to understand both the challenges and impacts of the ASE model on young people's education, training, and employment pathways. The book focuses on three broad themes; precarious youth and digital futures, material practice and sustainable economies, and cultural citizenship in the urban fringe. In exploring these themes, the book contributes to debates about the limits, possibilities and challenges that attach to, and emerge from, an ASE model and highlights the ways in which these models can contribute to young people's well-being, engagement, education and training, and work pathways. More broadly, it examines the possibilities of art as a means of social and cultural engagement. In the context of the precarious future of the creative industries, this book emphasise the ways in which young artists are building alternative economic and cultural models that support both individual pathways and collective change. This book will move the field forward with a critical lens that engages closely with experience and the lived realities of juggling multiple priorities of social, economic and artistic goals.

Written with beautiful clarity, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design asks the contemporary art world to be honest about the pervasive effects of commodification and the difficulty of staging critique. The book examines the collusion of 'art' and 'design' in contemporary artistic practices in order to find avenues of critique in a commercially driven cultural landscape. Grace McQuilten focuses on the work of Takashi Murakami, Andrea Zittel, Adam Kalkin and Vito Acconci, four contemporary artists who claim to be working in the field of design rather than the traditional art world. McQuilten argues that Zittel, Acconci and Kalkin engage with 'design' only to reactivate the critical practice of art in a more direct engagement with capital - and conceives of and affirms a future for art, outside of the art world, as a parasite in the complex beast of late capitalism. This book is an important and timely provocation to a cynical and apathetic consumer culture, and a call to arms for creative freedom and critical thought.

Contemporary art has a complex relationship to crisis. On the one hand, art can draw us toward apocalypse: it charts unfolding chaos, reflects and amplifies the effects of crisis, shows us the dystopian in both our daily life and in our imagined futures. On the other hand, art's complexity helps fathom the uncertainty of the world, question and challenge the order of things, and allows us to imagine new ways of living and being - to make new worlds. This collection of written and visual essays includes artistic responses to various crises - including the climate emergency, global and local inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic - and suggests new forms of collectivity and collaboration within artistic practice. It surveys a wide variety of practices, oriented from the perspective of Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Art making has always responded to the world; the essays in this collection explore how artists are adapting to a world in crisis. The contributions to this book are arranged in four sections: artistic responses; critical reflections, new curatorial approaches and the art school reimagined. Alongside the written chapters, three photographic essays provide specific examples of new visual forms in artistic practice under crisis conditions. The primary market for the book will be scholars and upper-level students of art and curating at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Specifically, the book will appeal to the burgeoning field of study around socially engaged art. Beyond the academic and student market, it will appeal to practicing artists and curators, especially those engaged in social practice and community-based art.

Art is produced, circulated, consumed and disseminated within an economic system - it depends on money for its creation, for the livelihood of its makers, and for its distribution. In this sense, art can be understood as an enterprising activity. However, profit-making is rarely the primary goal of artists, and indeed the entanglement of art with enterprise generates significant aesthetic, conceptual, philosophical and ethical challenges for contemporary art practice. Social enterprise has emerged from this complex terrain with the promise of an alternative model of economic organisation in the arts. Grace McQuilten and Anthony White argue that artists can, and have, engaged critically in the commercial market, by way of this model. Art as Enterprise brings a fresh perspective to the debate about the roles of contemporary art in consumer capitalist society.