Janez Strehovec

What distinguishes this book from other monographs on the social specificity of contemporary art is, first and foremost, the point of departure in art service, rather than in stable artwork as the artefact. The introduction of art service as a key concept of contemporary art enables a novel understanding of art as a cognitive, high-skilled, and performative practice oriented towards tasks, research, knowledge-making, and problem-solving activities. As a cognitive practice, art works hand in hand with other fields of the knowledge society and brings competitive knowledge to the world, knowledge that differs from the knowledge produced by the science-as-we-know-it and is set in the nearness of the knowledge produced by the activities of citizen science and civil society. The contemporary art service can also be applied to political tasks; such service is more subtle than traditional political devices and can be used as a significant tool in civil society engagement (e.g., art activism). The devices of art activism, such as subversive affirmation, making strange (defamiliarization), and detournement (introduced by the French Situationist movement), can be deployed in civil society and social media political struggles as well. Devices that are of importance in the inner life of art institutions, like branding and referring to art projects formed by canonic creators (as a kind of underlying asset), can be significant in financial markets, too. Rather than being an artist-genius separated from everyday people, the contemporary artist is a cognitive worker included in the hacker class (Wark, 2004) and the knowledge society.