Useful Art

How Activist Artists Can Change the World

By: John Byrne

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Paperback | 1 May 2026

At a Glance

Paperback
286 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 13.0 x 2.4

Paperback

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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.

Industry Reviews

'An indispensable book for understanding a practice that has moved as an undercurrent through art for nearly a century, challenging artists and critics to reconsider the enduring, urgent question: what is art for?'
Tania Bruguera, artist and activist

'With concrete examples and grounded Liverpudlian wit, John Byrne presents a clear, accessible and timely case for why the concept of Useful Art can provide an antidote to, and a way out of, the systems that envelop us.'
Alistair Hudson, Chairman, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

'John Byrne offers us a highly engaging and accessible insider's view of the Useful Art movement. An elucidating and enriching read.'
Giles Smith, Assemble

'With rigour and care, John Byrne reminds us that contemporary art can produce not only sharp questions, but workable answers. A critically useful book.'
Bill Balaskas, artist and theorist

'With his stacks of convincing stories-as-arguments, John Byrne's Useful Art might be the closest attempt from the English-speaking world to date to capture the original understanding of seni (Indonesian for art), which is neither autonomous nor binary. Reading this book will convince you that we have not lost everything. Yet.'
Farid Rakun, ruangrupa

'Culture, resistance, community: Byrne has written an essential wayfinder that shows us how Useful Art can challenge the neoliberal occupation of our lives, drawing on global ideas to "dig where you stand" for change.'
Owen Griffiths, artist

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