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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Book cover for Theory of the Rearguard
Book cover for Theory of the Rearguard

Cuban art critic and curator Iván de la Nuez returns with an ironic epitaph for contemporary art — an art criticism that examines contemporary art in the 21st century in relationship to politics, iconography, and literature.

“Iván de la Nuez transforms art criticism into an artform.” —Letras Libres

Theory of the Rearguard examines how contemporary art is in tension with survival, rather than in relation to life. In the twentieth century, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde was a cult book focused on the two main tasks that art demanded at the time: to break its representation and to destroy the barrier that separated it from life.

Forty years later, The Theory of the Rearguard is an ironic manifesto about contemporary art and its failures, even though Iván de la Nuez does not waste his time mourning it or disguising it. He argues that our times are not characterized by the distance between art and life, but by a tension between art and survival, which is the continuation of life by any means necessary.

In the twenty-first century, Iván de la Nuez examines art in relationship to politics, iconography, and literature. This austere and sharp book—in which Duchamp stumbles upon Lupe, the revolution upon the museum, Paul Virilio upon Joan Fontcuberta or Fukuyama upon Michael Jackson—wonders if contemporary art will ever end. Because if it were mortal—“just as mortal as everything it invokes or examines under its magnifying glass”—de la Nuez argues would be worth writing an epitaph for it as he has done in this sparkling book of art criticism.

Book cover for Theory of the Rearguard
Book cover for Theory of the Rearguard

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“Iván de la Nuez masterfully articulates the lexicon of the twenty-first century in Theory of the Rearguard, bridging the enduring gap between art, criticism, and readership.”

“Iván de la Nuez is the first writer who has the audacity to affirm that events, having first occurred as tragedy and then as farce, now occur as aesthetics.”