Margins
Duty Free Art book cover
Duty Free Art
Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
2017
First Published
4.12
Average Rating
251
Number of Pages

What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of "neurocurating," in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity. In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world's most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

Avg Rating
4.12
Number of Ratings
791
5 STARS
39%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl
Author · 8 books
Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, visual artist, and author in the field of essayist documentary video. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a Ph.D in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved