John Roberts (philosopher)

John Roberts is a British philosopher of art and aesthetics whose work engages with Marxist cultural theory, the avant-garde, and labour in art. He is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton.^[1]

John Roberts
Born	John Charles Roberts (1955-07-22) 22 July 1955 (age 70)
Occupation(s)	Philosopher, professor
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Wolverhampton
Academic work
Institutions	University of Wolverhampton
Main interests	Aesthetics

Career

Roberts has written extensively on conceptual art, the avant-garde, and the relationship between art and labour, authoring numerous books published by academic presses including Pluto, Verso, Haymarket, and Brill.^[2][3][4] His work has been widely engaged with in debates on aesthetics, critical theory, and cultural politics.^[5]

He is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton, where he leads the *Art, Philosophy and Social Practice* research cluster and has contributed to international academic programmes, including teaching and seminars in Dublin and New York.^[6]

Roberts has also delivered public lectures at major venues, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where he discussed Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde with philosopher Peter Osborne.^[7] He has appeared in academic documentaries, including one on the evolution, and then passing, of conceptual photography and art, produced by Source Photographic Review in 2012.^[8]

Selected works

• The Philistine Controversy (co-edited with Dave Beech; Verso, 2002)^[9]
• The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday (Manchester University Press, 1998)
• Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (Pluto Press, 2006)
• The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (Verso, 2007)
• The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2011)
• Photography and Its Violations (Columbia University Press, 2014)
• Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2015)
• Art and Theory After Marx (Haymarket Books, 2019)
• Red Days: Popular Music and the English Counterculture 1965–1975 (Verso, 2020)
• Art and Emancipation (Historical Materialism/Brill, 2023)
• Art, Misuse and Technology: Micheál O’Connell’s ‘System Interference’’ (Artwords Press, 2022)
• ‘Trickster’, Oxford Art Journal 22:1 (1999), pp. 81–101^[10]
• ‘Unfitting: Art and Labour from Conceptualisation to AI’, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 33:67 (2024), pp. 26–42^[11]

Reception

Barry Schwabsky, writing in *Art Journal Open*, called Roberts "one of the more original and independent thinkers among contemporary art historians" in his review of The Necessity of Errors.^[12]

In *Radical Philosophy*, Robert Spencer described The Intangibilities of Form as "an important and ambitious book that rewrites the history of twentieth-century art through a concern with work."^[5]