Ebook: Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency

In this provocative book, Santiago Zabala declares that in an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, only contemporary art's capacity to alter reality can save us. He advances a new aesthetics that draws on Martin Heidegger's distinction between works of art that rescue us from emergency and those that are rescuers into emergency. The former are conservers of the status quo; the latter are disruptive events that thrust us into emergencies. Zabala shows how art's ability to create new realities is fundamental to the politics of radical democracy today.

Santiago Zabala declares that in an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, contemporary art's ability to create new realities is fundamental to democracy. He advances a new aesthetics that draws on Martin Heidegger's distinction between works of art that rescue us from emergency and those that are rescuers into emergency.