Grant H. KesterThe Sovereign Self
Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde
Grant H. Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, author of Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, and coeditor of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010, all also published by Duke University Press.
Introduction 1
I. From Beauty to Dissensus
1. Freedom and Sovereignty 19
2. Communism and the Aesthetic State 48
II. Negation and Performativity
3. From Vanguard to Avant-Garde 85
4. Activism and Autonomy in the 1960s 108
III. Autonomy since the 1980s
5. The Rise of the Neo-Avant-Garde 145
6. The Hirschhorn Monument: Autonomy as Brand and Alibi 180
Conclusion. Aesthetics beyond Semblance 212
Notes 219
Works Cited 243
Index 259