Bookshelf

| browse books |
books
 

| book details |

Useful Art: How Activist Artists Can Change the World

By (author) John Byrne

| on special |

normal price: R 3 607.95

Price: R 3 426.95


| book description |

This smart, provocative book reveals how Useful Art is changing the world. Does art have to be beautiful? What if it can be useful instead? In this cutting-edge book, John Byrne shows how the concept of ‘Useful Art’ is helping artists and communities fight back against the neoliberal takeover of our spaces, services and lives. Byrne demonstrates that networks of artist-led activism and community-based direct action can provide a collaborative playbook of impactful and inclusive alternatives. From Turner Prize-winning urban regeneration projects to bakeries, vegetable gardens and multi-use arts spaces, Useful Art has enormous potential for bringing people together, recovering and preserving local skills and knowledge and reclaiming artistic endeavour for real-world good. Exploring an international selection of projects, exhibitions and activism, this important new work champions the shift from aesthetics to use value, challenging traditional ways of seeing the world symbolically through art. Reaching beyond the financial logic of the art world, Byrne shows how Useful Art can offer an artistic toolkit for implementing radical change. -- .

| product details |



Normally shipped | Forthcoming
Publisher | Manchester University Press
Published date | 20 Jan 2026
Language |
Format | Hardback
Pages | 288
Dimensions | 203 x 127 x 18mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 412g
ISBN | 978-1-5261-8154-1
Readership Age |
BISAC | art / criticism
Expected | 29 Apr 2026

| other options |



Normally shipped | Available from overseas. Usually dispatched in 14 days
Readership Age |
Normal Price | R 5 657.95
Price | R 5 374.95 | on special |



| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

Theory & Practice

Michelle de Kretser
Hardback
192 pages
was: R 415.95
now: R 373.95
Available from overseas. Dispatched in aprox 4-8 weeks as local supplier is out of stock


Exiles: Times book of the month 'Stanley Kubrick meets MR James'

Mason Coile
Paperback / softback
224 pages
was: R 542.95
now: R 488.95
Forthcoming

A terrifying locked-room mystery set in a remote outpost on Mars.

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans
Hardback
288 pages
was: R 495.95
now: R 445.95
Forthcoming


Broken Country: AMAZON'S BOOK OF THE YEAR - THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER

Clare Leslie Hall
Paperback / softback
320 pages
was: R 395.95
now: R 355.95
Available from overseas. Dispatched in aprox 4-8 weeks as local supplier is out of stock

An epic love story with the pulse of a thriller that asks: what would you risk for a second chance at first love?