"A 'slap in the face of public taste,' is how Mayakovsky described art's role in the buildup to the Russian Revolution, explicitly calling upon culture to assist in dismantling bourgeois society. More than a century later artistic acts of offense and transgression have morphed into predictable vanguard precepts; good for advancing one's career within a jaded art world, not so good for advancing positive social change. From performing sexual acts with butchered animals, to re-traumatizing Nazi camp survivors, each generation slaps harder at the establishment's face, only to be invited into its institutional citadel with fanfare. Meanwhile, environmentally damaging deals are signed by major art museums, even as they exhibit politically critical work and program socially interactive projects for the public's alleged edification. How then does one transgress that which thrives on transgression itself? Repurposing concepts such as 'repair' and 'fabulation,' Theo Reeves-Evison's avoids moralizing about these vexed cultural practices, offering instead a philosophical toolkit for finding our way out of transgression's shadows. Ethics of Contemporary Art dares us to imagine a productive engagement with contemporary art's cultural misdeeds while avoiding either falling back into a Victorian idealization of high culture, or celebrating transgression for transgression's sake." -- Gregory Sholette, author of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (2017) "This reconfiguration of the relationship between ethics and art has been long overdue. In a psychoanalytically inflected investigation guided by Lacan and Guattari, Reeves-Evison impressively moves the parameters of the role of ethics in the process of how art shapes subjectivity.

" -- Silke Panse, Reader in Film, Art and Philosophy, University for the Creative Arts, UK " Ethics of Contemporary Art breaks important new ground by moving the debate on art and ethics away from dominant paradigms of the transgressive artist. It focuses instead on artworks themselves to propose that we think ethics as repair, that is, as a speculative and productive endeavour capable of shaping and recreating the social." -- João Florêncio, Senior Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, University of Exeter, UK.