Autonomy

"With wide-ranging scholarship, brilliant and learned commentary, and prose that is impressive for its energy and clarity, Nicholas Brown has written a book that accomplishes what no other work has. A major contribution." - Michael Fried, author of What Was Literary Impressionism?

“In a series of deft and frequently astonishing readings ranging from Richard Linklater's films and Charles Ray's totaled cars to the White Stripes' music and Jennifer Egan's novels, Nicholas Brown's startlingly intelligent Autonomy transforms our understanding of contemporary aesthetic philosophy, literature, and theories of art.” - Lisa Siraganian, author of Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life

"In Autonomy, Brown revitalizes a modernist commitment to form and offers a compelling vision of the work of art in the age of its commodification." - Adam Theron-Lee Rensch, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The most compelling and convincing argument is in his final chapter, 'Modernism on TV' in which Brown explores how the aesthicisation of genre is another strategy necessary for close interpretive analysis of the work of art." - Alexandra Hall, Art Monthly

"Brown's argument feels, in the end, surprisingly liberating.… No doubt, there are questions prompted by the book that we still might want to have answered.… But these queries are obviously presented less as a critique of Autonomy than a plea to scholars to take up related questions in future volumes. Autonomy inspires such questions because this is a book that unabashedly and provocatively makes demands of us, in the way the very best scholarship, like the very best manifestos and all art, does too." - Lisa Siraganian, Modernism/modernity

"A thorough and valuable commentary on the contemporary position of art within capitalism. Autonomy is essential reading for researchers and students with an interest in contemporary art in relation to the market, and for those interested in Marxist approaches to contemporary aesthetic form." - Oliver Haslam, New Formations