The Empire of Non-Sense
Art in the Technological Society
Jacques Ellul
Introductory essays by Samir Younés & David Lovekin
Translated into English for the first time, Jacques Ellul’s ground-breaking Empire of Non-Sense analyses the relation between technology, art, rationality and human freedom.
260 x 210 mm
168 pages
Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-906506-40-7
£25.00
Subjects: Art & Design, Art Theory
Many modern artists and architects continue to imagine and build the world technologically. They remain firm believers in technology as a liberator from previous artistic traditions and a provider of vast means of production. All artistic traditions were seemingly put aside by the paintings of Cézanne, the poetry of Baudelaire, and the architecture of Le Corbusier. Behind this apparent freedom French critic, author of the classic The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul found an absolute slavery. The artist was the handmaiden of technology, a relation the artist no longer understood, like other citizens of technological culture. Artists acclaimed their unbridled individualism while being intensely determined by the forces of technological culture. Ellul examines this process in modern art from the beginning of the twentieth century where the sense of art—its meaning and embodiments—is reduced to non-sense. Published in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame.
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