Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

A collection of essays in which Hito Steyerl asks how art can be made or appreciated when arms manufacturers sponsor museums and valuable artworks serve as a currency in speculative markets.

The essays take up video games, WikiLeaks, spam and the circulation of images, and treat the contemporary art world as part of the political economy it appears to comment on. Verso published the collection in 2017 as Duty Free Art, with a paperback following in 2019.

Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich) is a filmmaker and writer who has taught new media art at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her video works include How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) and Factory of the Sun (2015). Her essays and her moving-image work address the same subjects: media, technology, militarization and the global circulation of images.