Author of Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013) and director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London, Peter Osborne approaches how the field of contemporary art since the 1960s has been characterized by both the attempted dissolution and the reflective expansion of the concept of artistic form. According to Osborne, “recently, in the wake of the revisionist historiography of the exhibitions of that time, the motif of something ‘becoming form’ has been revived and applied in new critical contexts. What, if anything, delimits this expansion of the concept of artistic form? Might it be extended all the way to the crisis-ridden form of historical present? How today might we conceive crisis as form?”
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London.