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Marin Kosut

Professor of Sociology

 

Marin Kosut teaches courses on art, urbanity and visual culture. Her forthcoming book Art Monster: On The Impossibility of New York will be published by Columbia University Press in June 2024. 

Art Monster book cover

She is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Gender in Media (Sage), co-editor of The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings (NYU Press), and co-author of Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee (NYU Press).  

In 2016, she founded Pay Fauxn an “impure post-white cube gallery in the anti-formalist tradition” located at an abandoned pay phone shell at a bus stop at a defunct nursing home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. From 2013-2017, she co- produced exhibitions and other projects as GCA (group club association) in Bushwick, Brooklyn and most recently at  Bible, a black cube gallery in a basement in Chinatown, NYC. 

More About Me

Selfie w/ Ruscha Selfie w/ Ruscha Pay Fauxn Pay Fauxn

 

Bible Bible
 

 

 

Research Interests

artists, failure, autofiction, outsiderness, vampires, bullshit jobs, gen X/Y/ Z

‘worship me’ by amanda

Representative Courses

  • On Fashion 
  • Art & Outsiderness
  • Generation XYZ
  • Artworlds & Their Discontents 
  • Feminism, Art & Performance
  • Culture, Consumption & the City 
  • The Body: Medium & Message

Publications

Books

Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York, Columbia University Press, Spring 2024

Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee, co-authored with Lisa Jean Moore, New York University Press, October 2013, Winner of the 2014 ASA Distinguished Scholarship Book Award

Encyclopedia of Gender in Media, editor, Sage, May 2012

The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings, co-edited with Lisa Jean Moore, New York University Press, February 2010

Fiction/ Non-Fiction

“Puce,” Vol.1 Brooklyn  

“Opal, Opal,” Hobart 

“The Artists I Knew,” Rejection Letters

“Crease,” Dead Skunk

Interviews

“On Feminist Triads, Mining the Failures of Selfhood, and Maggie Nelson Impersonation,” Interview with Alex Auder, Write or Die

Peer-Reviewed Articles 

“We are the Scene: Alternative Art Economies in Bushwick,” Metropolotiques, September 13, 2016

“Where Did the Bees Go? New York City Beekeeping Amid Ecological Crises,” Metropolotiques, April 5, 2016 (co-authored with Lisa Jean Moore)

“Visualizing Charisma: Representations of the Charismatic Touch,” Visual Studies, November 2014, (co-authored with Matthew Immergut)

“The Artification of Tattoo: Transformations Within a Cultural Field,” Cultural Sociology, May 2013

“Bees Making Art: Insect Aesthetics and the Ecological Moment,” Humanimalia, February 2014 (co-authored with Lisa Jean Moore)

 “Among the Colony: Ethnographic Fieldwork, Urban Bees and Intraspecies Mindfulness,” Ethnography, November 2013 (co-authored with Lisa Jean Moore)

“An Ironic Fad: The Commodification and Consumption of Tattoos,” The Journal of Popular Culture, December 2006

“Professorial Capital: Blue-collar Reflections on Class, Culture and the Academy,” Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, 6 (2): May 2006. Reprinted in Contemporary Readings in Sociology, edited by Kathleen Korgan. Pine Forge Press: 2008

 “Mad Artists and Tattooed Perverts: Deviant Discourse and the Social Construction of Cultural Categories,” Deviant Behavior, 27 (1): Feb 2006

Selected Book Chapters

“Making a Feminist Stink: Nature in the Museum,” Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender. Edited by Iris van der Tuin, MacMillan USA, September 2016

“Queering Gender Art and Culture in the Age of Media Convergence,” in The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology edited by David Inglis, Sage, September 2016

“Urban Api-ethnography: The Matter of Relations between Humans and Honeybees,” in Mattering: Feminism, Science and Materialism edited by Victoria Pitts-Taylor, NYU Press, July 2016 (co-authored with Lisa Jean Moore)

“Tattoos and Body Modification,” International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd Edition, edited by James D. Wright, Elsevier, May 2015

“Bees, Borders and Bombs: A Social Account of Theorizing Bees,” with Lisa Jean Moore, in Animal and War, Edited by Ryan Hidger, Brill Press, December, 2012

“Virtual Body Modification: Identity, Embodiment and Second Life Avatars,” in Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge, edited by Paisley Currah and Monica Casper, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

“Extreme Bodies/Extreme Culture,” in The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural readings, Lisa-Jean Moore and Mary Kosut, New York University Press, February 2010

Presentations / Conferences

“The Artist Precariat,” presented at the 14th Annual International Arts & Society Conference, Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, Portugal, June 2019

“Other Art Worlds: Alternative Art Economies in New York City,” presented at the 12th Annual Arts & Society Conference, American University, Paris, France, June 2017

“99% of the Art World: Making Art and Rent in New York City,”  presented at Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting, Philadelphia, February 2017

“Forrest Bess: The Insider’s Outsider” with writer/producer Chuck Smith at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, March 2014

“Worker Bees/Working Bees: Interspecies Ethics and the Invisible Labor of Insects,” talk presented at the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting, Baltimore, MD, February 2014

“Toward an Ontology of the Bee: Ethnography and Urban Beekeeping” talk presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting, New York City, August 2014

“Ecology and Artworlds: The Bee as Artist and Object,” talk presented at the Cultural Studies Association annual meeting, Chicago, May 2013

Exhibitions / Performances

“New World UNLTD,” performance, group exhibition and accompanying publication, Shoot the Lobster, Lower East Side, NYC, October 7-16, 2016 

“Bindle 2016,” group exhibition curated by Sorry Archive, Orgy Park, Bushwick, Brooklyn, September 2, 2017