About this item
One of the country's leading activist curators explores how corporations and governments have used art and culture to mystify and manipulate us.The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising and marketing transformed the way the powerful communicate with the rest of us. A century later, the tools are more sophisticated than ever, the onslaught more relentless. In Culture as Weapon, acclaimed curator and critic Nato Thompson reveals how institutions use art and culture to ensure profits and constrain dissent--and shows us that there are alternatives. An eye-opening account of the way advertising, media, and politics work today, Culture as Weapon offers a radically new way of looking at our world.
About the Author
NATO THOMPSON is a writer and Artistic Director at Creative Time, one of New York's most prestigious art organizations. He is the editor of Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art 1991-2011, Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, The Interventionists: A Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, a survey of political art of the 1990s, and Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History. He has written two books, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. He has curated numerous projects including Kara Walkers: A Subtlety, Jeremy Deller's: It is What it is, Living as Form, Trevor Paglens: Last Pictures, Paul Chan's Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, and most recently Pedro Reyes: Doomocracy.
