Scandalous Times

We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in revelatory terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, truth. Otherswill be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet these ordinary scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamentaland fundamentally rareform of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such real scandal, but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy. From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this static fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.