Where Art Belongs

Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. In Where Art Belongs, Chris Kraus delves into these innovative artistic enterprises through four interlinked essays. Kraus expands the argument begun in her earlier book, Video Green, that "the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it."

Moving from New York to Berlin, Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus addresses subjects such as the ubiquity of video, the legacy of the 1960s Amsterdam underground newspaper Suck, and the activities of the New York art collective Bernadette Corporation. She examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix.

Chronicling the sometimes doomed but persistently heroic efforts of small groups of artists to reclaim public space and time, Where Art Belongs describes the trend towards collectivity manifested in the visual art world during the past decade. It also highlights the small forms of resistance to digital disembodiment and the hegemony of the entertainment/media/culture industry. For all its faults, Kraus argues, the art world remains the last frontier for the desire to live differently.