Boris Groys

Since Plato, philosophers have dreamed of establishing a rational state ruled through the power of language. In this radical and disturbing account of Soviet philosophy, Boris Groys argues that communism shares that dream and is best understood as an attempt to replace financial with linguistic bonds as the cement uniting society. The transformative power of language, the medium of equality,...

Modern history is a history of aesthetisations – and every aesthetisation raises a claim of protection. We aestheticise and want to protect almost everything, including Earth, oceans, the atmosphere, rare animal species, and exotic plants. Humans are no exception. They also present themselves as objects of contemplation that deserve admiration and care. For some time, artists and intellectuals struggled for...

To the philosopher Boris Groys, everything technology produces in the modern world ultimately falls into two categories – it's art, or it's garbage. Both are useless, defunctionalized objects that simply lie there. The difference between them comes when we immunise art from the destructive power of time to which we devoutly deliver our garbage. In this collection of essays and...

To the philosopher Boris Groys, everything technology produces in the modern world ultimately falls into two categories – it’s art, or it's garbage. Both are useless, defunctionalized objects that simply lie there. The difference between them comes when we immunise art from the destructive power of time to which we devoutly deliver our garbage. In this collection of essays and...

Jeff Wall (b.1946) adopts the nineteenth-century poet Baudelaire's famous description of one of his contemporaries as 'a painter of modern life' to describe his own very different work: huge transparencies mounted on to light boxes that diffuse a brilliant glow of white light evenly through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations.Wall is foremost among the pioneering...

Our current culture is dominated by the ideology of creativity. One is supposed to create the new and not to care about things as they are. This ideology legitimises the domination of the “creative class” over the rest of the population, which is predominantly occupied by forms of care—medical care, childcare, agriculture, industrial maintenance, and so on. We have a...