On the New

A philosophical study of how the new comes into being in culture, translated here into English by G. M. Goshgarian.

Groys 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. The line separating the valuable from the worthless, and culture from profanity, keeps shifting, and that movement is the center of the investigation. The book tries to map what constitutes artistic innovation and what processes underpin its recognition and appropriation.

Boris Groys is an art critic, media theorist and philosopher, now a global distinguished professor at New York University, who works on contemporary art, Russian intellectual history and media theory. On the New translates Über das Neue: Versuch einer Kulturökonomie, published in Munich in 1992. His other books include The Total Art of Stalinism, Art Power (2008), The Communist Postscript (2010) and Introduction to Antiphilosophy (2012). Verso issued this English edition in 2014.