Under the public gaze for well over a decade contemporary art still baffles and bewilders the average viewer even though there is an increasing verbal dialogue and inquiry through book publication on its phenomenal occurrence. In the West, space devoted to the genre in the art book publishing industry is expanding to catch up with contemporary arts prolific production. A Contemporary Artists' Books Conference held annually under the aegis of the New York Book Fair focuses on emerging practices and debates within art book culture.

A two-day event, this year’s book conference sessions will cover appropriation-based artwork, intellectual property, arts publishing practices in Tokyo, Taipei and Seoul, sound and text inter-media publication and graphical notation. Other than this a specialist contemporary art publisher, The Green Box, established in 2005, is committed to producing exceptional artists’ books as well as monographs on contemporary art. Around 40 books have come out so far and they continue to build a strong profile and a varied audience in the field of contemporary art.

Careful to maintain editorial quality, distinctive design and high production values, The Green Box have succeeded in positioning the company as an independent producer and as a publishing partner for museums and institutions.

Widely examined and explored by academics and intellectuals, it is contemporary arts recent radical scholarship in books, readers, manuals and journals that is taking the bull by the horns. Going beyond mere platitudes they are peeling layers to reveal its complex underlying dynamics. The most recent volume excavating the densities of contemporary art is, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Age of Cultural Production, by a noted American curator Nato Thompson.

A significant meditation on political art and the politics of art the paperback, Seeing Power… explores the implications of how incredibly different the world is today than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. A fog of information and images has flooded the environment from advertising, television, radio, and film to the information glut produced by the new economy. With many of the tools of art now integral elements of major industries (advertising, public relations, design) the territory for making art (and perhaps more radically meaning itself) has had to shift.

Curator and critic Thompson interrogates the implications of these developments for those dedicated to socially engaged art and activism. How can anyone find a voice and make are change when the world is flooded with images and information. And what is one to make of the endless machine of consumer capitalism, which has appropriated much from the history of art and in recent years, the methods of grass roots political organising and social networking.

Highlighting the work of some of the most innovative and interesting artists and activists working today, Thompson reads and praises sites and institutions that empower their communities to see power and reimagine it. From cooperative housing to anarchist info shops to alternative art venues, Thompson shows that many of today’s most innovative spaces operate as sites of dramatic personal transformation.

Scheduled for a Dec 11, 2012 release, the book is not eligible for reviews as yet, but the author is already being interviewed about his theoretical claims in his wide ranging talk at Temple Gallery, Philadelphia, early this year he threw down the gauntlet. Make the arts relevant or they will be pathetic and irrelevant. He asked rhetorically, how art can be relevant when it has to compete daily with the 3,000 advertising and other corporate images we are bombarded with. All those ads, logos, and stuff in our visual field, he said, — they have taken over. They own the cultural discussion.

In a Q and A with Daniel Kunitz for Artinfo magazine he stresses, “Artists are the people trying to make meaning in the world, and making meaning in the world is very difficult today because we live in an extremely coercive landscape. Discussions about art get stuck in what the market is willing to fund. But I hope this book produces a lot of various ways of thinking about art.” The book considers art production in an age of American neo-liberalism and how artists might liberate grass roots political organising, social networking, and even the history of art from the grasp of consumer capitalism

Among journalists already endorsing the book Susan Salter Reynolds of Los Angeles Times writes: “Living in cities, we need a new way to think about how we move and what we notice... This strange, exciting book offers just that — a new way to notice public space.”

Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Age of Cultural Production By NatoThompson [Paperback] Melville house Books Publication Date: December 11, 2012