Jonathan Harris - The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919-2009

This edition first published 2013
2013 Jonathan Harris

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harris, Jonathan (Jonathan P.), author.
The utopian globalists : artists of worldwide revolution, 19192009 / Jonathan Harris.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9301-6 (hardback) 1. Art and globalizationHistory20th century.
2. Art and globalizationHistory 21st century. I. Title.
N72.G55H37 2013
709.04dc23

2012035996

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

... can any mortal be a creator? Yes, answered the spirits; for every human creature can create an immaterial world fully inhabited by immaterial creatures, and populous of immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within the compass of a head or scull; nay, not only so, but he may create a world of what fashion and government he will, and give the creature thereof such motions, figures, forms, colours, perceptions, etc. as he pleases, and make whirlpools, light pressures and reactions, etc., as he thinks best; nay, he may make a world full of veins, muscles, and nerves, and all these to move by one jolt or stroke: also he may alter that world as often as he pleases, or change it from a natural world, to an artificial; he may make a world of ideas, a world of atoms, a world of lights, or whatsoever his fancy leads him to. And since it is in your power to create such a world, what need you to venture life, reputation and tranquility, to conquer a gross material world?

Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World, in Susan James (ed.), Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2003 [1666], 5109): 72.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004 [1970, in German]): 1