List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part One: Avant-Gardes
1. Signed In Red. The First Avant-Garde
2. Blue Voids. The Modernist Avant-Garde And The Permanence Of Art
Part Two: Theories and Critiques
3. Society as a Work of Art?
4. States of Exception
5. Saying The Unsayable
Part Three: Critical Practices
6. After The Statues
7. Exhibiting Dissent
8. Revolution is Sublime
9. Beauty is Convulsive

Bibliography
Index

Malcolm Miles is a writer and researcher on critical and cultural theory, art and urbanism. Previously Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth, UK, he is the author of Art, Space and the City (1997), Urban Avant-Gardes (2004), Cities and Cultures (2007), and Urban Utopias (2008), Herbert Marcuse: an Aesthetics of Liberation (2011), Eco-Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Limits to Culture (2015).

Art has always been central to moments of great social change. From the avant-garde to the ages of revolution, the act of rebellious creation has been crucial to bringing people and ideas together. However, in an increasingly fractured world characterised by upheaval and crisis, what role can art play in ushering in transformation?
Malcolm Miles offers a guide to contemporary art and activism, setting it firmly within the context of the avant garde and its legacies in the postwar period. He explores the rise of direct action to replace representational politics in organizations like Occupy and Extinction Rebellion, and in the movements to destroy or remove statues of slavers, and finds parallels in anti-institutional art practices. By engaging with the significant theoretical innovations of the last 50 years - modernism, postmodernism and contemporary critical thinking - Miles provides both an overview of political aesthetics and an introduction to how art activism works in its most memorable moments in history.
Art Rebellion argues that beauty is radically other to the dominant society; that power relations can be transformed; that protest cultures and contemporary art grow together; and that art has a crucial interruptive role in forming new, more equal and just, realities.