Plastic Capitalism

Amanda Boetzkes engages powerfully with art's roles in exposing and helping us to think through both current and historical habits of waste. Her book makes a timely and trenchant contribution to a broad understanding of contemporary art and to the specific urgency of understanding waste.

Mark A. Cheetham, Professor, History of Art, University of Toronto, Author of Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the '60s

In Boetzkes's fascinating book, art is contextualized in the world of globalized and aestheticized consumer capitalism—and it has an engaged role to play: one of representation, trenchant critique, and presumably the instigation of social and ecological transformation. This is basic reading for anyone interested in contemporary art (and its future), and a fundamental reference point for all forthcoming work on this topic.

Allan Stoekl, Professor Emeritus, Penn State University, author of Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability

Boetzkes offers a broad and subtle discussion of sustainability, art, and plastic waste in a world governed by neoliberal capitalism. The book shows us how we might strip away that veneer and make a spectacle of the waste that constitutes its materiality. Whether through a quasi-ecstatic celebration of our intimate coexistence with waste, or through photographic autopsy of the bodies that died from ingesting our plastic, the works discussed in this volume expose the undeniable fact that plastic is everywhere.

The Literary Review of Canada

In her trenchant critique, she addresses the global trend of waste in visual culture, while surveying the implications on our collective value systems and the universal ecological condition.