New on-line: an interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson about art and politics. The interview is available here. Here’s an excerpt from my introduction to the conversation: Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned solely with aesthetic quality, the imagination, enjoyment, and so forth. On the other are the partisans of “political art,” for whom art is not only always political, but is to be judged according to how it meets certain political standards. Two new books, by the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill and the curator Nato Thompson, aim to oppose both camps. Neither of these, Rockhill and Thompson claim, offers a framework sufficiently attuned to the complexities of actual artistic and political practice. Rather than abstractly theorizing art’s role in society, they argue, we should follow and engage the artworks through their historical and social contexts—as they are produced, displayed, circulated, and interpreted.