a kind of forever present that takes the form of a theatrical script to perform a fictitious conversation among cultural theorists that considers what ever happened to postmodernism. The script culls parts of seminal texts by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, Clement Greenberg and Jennifer Allen and combines them into a discussion about the transformation of postmodernism into a hybrid, constant stream of social media and digital technology that inherently changes our relationship with time.

Things were mopey in the K-HOLE offices. Dystopia texts no longer made Sean *zing*. Greg was depressed because he didn’t feel like there was any imagination anymore. When Emily thought about what that meant, the only thing that came to mind was Disneyland. Chris refused to do any client work whatsoever. Dena had long since moved to Los Angeles…

The Art world is not a success. It is not progressive, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous, it is not unbiased – and it frequently misses opportunities to perform better. The art world is a world we dislike, and, in the long term, despise. A machine of accelerated aesthetics, burnouts, precarious living, 24/7 availability and galvanised gossip that is motivated by survival, rather than a common good. I am partial to the thought that the art world has succumbed to something not entirely human, some- thing which in some circles is referred to as Capitalism. ...

What is really the main shortcoming of art today? Where is the essence of its unfulfilled promise of a better world? According to Slovenian art theoretician Bojana Kunst1, a possible answer can be formulated with regard to the paradox that the artist personifies the ideal of the post-Fordist worker who produces using cognitive and affective powers in flexible working conditions without making a distinction between work and free time. Time is the neuralgic point of general precarisation symbolised by the image of the artist, which is the focus of the exhibition A Taste for Work by the Fokus Grupa art collective. ...

In his long-term artistic project Theatrum Botanicum, Uriel Orlow considers plants as actors on a political stage: protagonists of colonial trade, flower diplomacy, or bio-piracy. As such, they serve as a prism through which environmental colonial history can be re-negotiated. Theatrum Botanicum can be read as an attempt to decolonize both, history and nature. And for decolonizing nature, it is crucial how plants are considered as acting and living beings. If they tell stories about colonialism, how are they brought to speak?

After the loss of a counter-model for capitalism—which socialism, in its real, existing form had presented until its collapse—alternative concepts for economic and social development face hard times at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the industrial nations, broadly discussed are only those “alternatives” that do not question the existing power relations of the capitalist system and representative democracies. Other socio-economic approaches are labeled utopian, devalued, and excluded from serious discussion if even considered at all. This edition of the republicart web journal presents transcriptions from 13 videos from Oliver Ressler’s thematic installation Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies focusing on diverse ...

Angela Nagle discusses Millennial values, Silicon Valley ideology, NGOs and moral fanaticism.

Let’s be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are revealed as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more interesting?

The New Creative Paradigm FACING THE LAST STAGES OF LATE CAPITALISM, WE PREDICT THE DAWN OF A NEW WAY OF WORKING FOR THE CREATIVE CLASS. The landscape that fostered post- modern cultural creation is in flames. If we are able to evolve, this fire will raze a forest whose dead roots cling to a dead system, and from its ashes will rise a new creative paradigm. If we refuse, we will be left speaking a dead language, to no one, in the dark. The internet has ushered in a new age, a faster digital reality that speaks to more people more loudly. For ...

Volume I. Quarantine explores the hollow interiority and introspective anxieties produced by an end-stage capitalist society thrust into a global pandemic. Contributors probe the possibilities of sustainable artist industries that are independent from traditional frameworks and economies, relying on personal networks for inspiration and the production of meaningful work. Featured are innovative artists laying the foundation for a cyber-modern future, engaging in DIY biology sculpture, live coding for music, vaporwave and darkwave synth-tech, audiovisual liquid light projection, textile recycling, generative 3D processing, webcam performance, digital Suprematist collaging, and televisual metalepsis, to name a few.

Bifurcating means: reconstituting a political economy that reconnects local knowledge and practices with macroeconomic circulation and rethinks territoriality at its different scales of locality; developing an economy of contribution on the basis of a contributory income no longer tied to employment and once again valuing work as a knowledge activity; overhauling law, and government and corporate accounting, via economic and social experiments, including in laboratory territories, and in relation to cooperative, local market economies formed into networks and linked to international trade; revaluing research from a long-term perspective, independent of the short-term interests of political and economic powers; reorienting digital ...

City planners across the planet have recently adopted gentrification led by creatives as a development strategy for increasing the wealth of cities while also promoting inclusiveness, diversity and social integration, all of which are important to these cities’ engagement in global networks, as well as increasing capital with minimum political objection. An all-round win. However, faced with growing socioeconomic inequalities within major cities over the same period— and between global urban hotspots, or what are called ‘superstar cities’, such as New York, London, Shanghai, Dubai and the rest—even Richard Florida, proselytiser-in-chief for creative gentrification as the path to urban ‘renewal’, ...