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Useful Art
How Activist Artists Can Change the World
Brief Description
This smart, provocative book reveals how Useful Art is changing the world. Does art have to be beautiful? What if it can be useful instead? In this cutting-edge book, John Byrne shows how the concept of Useful Art is helping artists and communities fight back against...
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Useful Art
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See moreUseful Art explores how art can be a tool for activism and resistance against neoliberalism. Highlighting projects from urban regeneration to community gardens, it showcases how art can foster inclusion, reclaim local knowledge, and drive real-world change.
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Description
This smart, provocative book reveals how Useful Art is changing the world.
Does art have to be beautiful? What if it can be useful instead? In this cutting-edge book, John Byrne shows how the concept of Useful Art is helping artists and communities fight back against the neoliberal takeover of our spaces, services, and lives.
Byrne demonstrates that networks of artist-led activism and community-based direct action can provide a collaborative playbook of impactful and inclusive alternatives. From Turner Prize-winning urban regeneration projects to bakeries, vegetable gardens, and multi-use arts spaces, Useful Art has enormous potential for bringing people together, recovering and preserving local skills and knowledge, and reclaiming artistic endeavour for real-world good.
Exploring an international selection of projects, exhibitions, and activism, this important new work champions the shift from aesthetics to use value, challenging traditional ways of seeing the world symbolically through art. Reaching beyond the financial logic of the art world, Byrne shows how Useful Art can offer an artistic toolkit for implementing radical change.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781526181572
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 20 January 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Illustration: 23 black & white illustrations
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 15.0mm
Width: 127.0mm
Height: 128.0mm
Weight: 284g
Pages: 288
About the Author
John Byrne is Professor of Useful Art at Liverpool School of Art and Creative Industries. For over a decade he has been at the forefront of research into art and use value, working with world-renowned artists and curators to explore how art can resist, engage with or offer alternatives to the current conditions of global neoliberalism.
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