A Western Marxist reading of contemporary art, focusing on the question of the continued presence (or absence) of the avant-garde's transgressive impulse. Taking art's ability to contribute to radical social transformation as its point of departure, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen's new title from Zero Books analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, including relational aesthetics and interventionist art, new institutionalism and post-modern architecture. '...a trenchant critique of neoliberal domination of contemporary art.' Gene Ray, author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

In Trump's Counter-Revolution, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen looks behind the craziness of Donald Trump to decipher the formation of a new kind of fascism, late-capitalist fascism, that is intent on preventing any kind of real social change. Trump projects an image of America as threatened, but capable of re-creating itself as a united, white and patriarchal community: "Make America great again". After forty years of extreme, uneven development in the US, Trump's late-capitalist fascism fuses popular culture and ultra-nationalism in an attempt to renew the old alliance between the white working class and the capitalist class, preventing the coming into being of an anti-capitalist alliance between Occupy and Black Lives Matter. 'A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trump's racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism - democracy itself - as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony.' Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War

In spite of the steadily expanding concept of art in the Western world, art made in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes -- notably nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the communist East Bloc countries -- is still to a surprising degree excluded from main stream art history and the exhibits of art museums. In contrast to earlier art made to promote princely or ecclesiastical power, this kind of visual culture seems to somehow not fulfil the category of 'true' art, instead being marginalised as propaganda for politically suspect regimes. This book wants to modify this displacement, comparing totalitarian art with modernist and avant-garde movements; confronting their cultural and political embeddings; and writing forth their common genealogies. Its eleven articles include topics as varied as: the concept of totalitarianism and totalitarian art, totalitarian exhibitions, monuments and architecture, forerunners of totalitarian art in romanticism and heroic realism, and diverse receptions of totalitarian art in democratic cultures.