<i>Sociopolitical Aesthetics</i> is without doubt the best political analysis of art’s ‘social turn’, which it revisits through a reexamination of the contested meanings of collectivity and a re-reading of debates on aesthetics and politics within the context of neoliberalism, the globalisation of contemporary art and narratives of crisis. Charnley combines first rate art historical scholarship with razor sharp political analysis and an insider’s understanding of contemporary art to explain the rise of socially engaged art against the prevailing wisdom that art as an institution must neutralise dissent, through co-optation, absorption, incorporation, and recuperate and by turning politics into aesthetics. What if, Charnley asks, the art system has reached the limit of its ability to contain the critical practices that occupy it.

Dave Beech, Reader in Art and Marxism, University of the Arts London, UK