On the New

On the New looks at the economies of exchange and valuation that drive modern culture's key sites: the intellectual marketplace and the archive. As ideas move from one context to another, newness is created. This continuous shifting of the line that separates the valuable from the worthless, culture from profanity, is at the center of Boris Groys's investigation which aims to map the uncharted territory of what constitutes artistic innovation and what processes underpin its recognition and appropriation.

“One of the most astute commentators on the art scene today."—New Left Review

"Groys combines revelatory analysis with philosophical questions that go to the heart of cultural production today."—Iwona Blazwick

"On the New does more to explain the ways that art becomes art in the contemporary world than any book in recent memory. Page after page, Groys formulates ingenious constructions that describe the unique characteristics of the cultural artifacts of our time, while simultaneously compelling the reader to think in a distinctly artistic way about these artifacts. In a very real sense this narrative manages to produce the “newness” that it so vividly describes"—Matthew Jesse Jackson

"What the new is not, and other lessons on the cultural economy of revalorization from the master of Slavic nihilism. Postmodernism came and went, but Groys’s diagnoses have outlived it"—Peter Osnorne 

"With his characteristic delight in paradox and defamiliarization, Groys detonates a series of mind-bombs concerning the sacred and profane (what counts as culture?), tradition and rupture (how does culture enter the archive?) and the intimate connection between fashion and history." —Claire Bishop