Contact details

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN

 

+44 (0)20 7848 2804

julian.stallabrass@courtauld.ac.uk





Julian Stallabrass lectures in modern and contemporary art, including political aspects of the globalised contemporary art world, postwar British art, the history of photography and new media art. Aside from his recent publications listed below, he is the author of Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London 1996; the co-editor of Ground Control: Technology and Utopia, Black Dog Publishing, London 1997, Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1998, and Locus Solus, a book about the Newcastle-based artist-led curatorial organisation Locus+. He also writes art criticism for many publications including Tate, Photoworks, Art Monthly, and the New Statesman. In 2001 he curated an exhibition at Tate Britain entitled Art and Money Online. He curated the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial. He is an editorial board member of Art History, New Left Review and Third Text and on the advisory board of Visual Culture in Britain. His photography has been exhibited and published internationally.

 

Current research/interests

 

Julian Stallabrass’ published work has centred on issues arising from developments in British art, the history of photography, and the relationship between fine art and mass culture. More recently, he has been working in the linked areas of global contemporary art, online art and culture, and the political role of art. High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s (1999, revised edition 2006) is a critical analysis of ‘young British art’, examining the conditions in which it came to prominence, its relation to the mass media, and its fall from fashionability. Paris Pictured, accompanying the exhibition Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968, was published by the Royal Academy in 2002; it examined the relation between photography and urbanism in the city over the period covered by the exhibition. His book Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, the first book-length account of the subject to appear, was published by Tate Publications in 2003; it draws out the links between the collaborative, gift-giving ethos of online activists and much Internet art, arguing that this poses a series of fundamental challenges to the mainstream art world. Art Incorporated (2004) analyses changes in the global art world since 1989, and investigates contemporary art’s connection with and uses for neoliberalism. The book investigates the uses of art by states and corporations, which are set against the conventional art-world view of art’s non-instrumental character, and argues that the contention between the two is growing stronger and more visible. In this situation, art that appears to the viewer to be of manifest use, whether it is advertising a product or highlighting a political issue, may be the least obfuscating and propagandist. Art Incorporated was recently republished as A Very Short Introduction to Contemporary Art. He is now working on a book about photographic images of war in the age of new media.

In addition, Stallabrass curated the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial. Entitled Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, it explored, through a series of exhibitions and events, the changing character of war photography across photojournalism, museum photography, installation and amateur productions, along with the changing mediascape in which they are seen. More information can be found here: http://www.bpb.org.uk/2008



Programmes taught during the forthcoming academic year

 

  • Mellon/ Research Forum MA (taught with Malcolm Bull): Aestheticising Politics? The Political in Globalised Contemporary Art



Doctorates Supervised:

 

  • Postmodern photography and British art institutions.
  • Digital photography and modernist photographic practice and theory.
  • East and West German photography, theories of aesthetics and the problem of subjectivity.
  • British postwar landscape painting.
  • The new economy of the contemporary art world.
  • Photography and the new political movements, from 1968 to the present.
  • Scale in contemporary sculpture.
  • Art and Internet 2.0 in East Asian culture.
  • The service economy in contemporary art.
  • Japanese and Korean strategies in the global art world.
  • Conceptual Art and the Cold War.
  • Contemporary photography and its Victorian precedents.
  • Indian postwar photography.



Online texts


Click here for list


Photographic Projects