Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven & Earth is available as paperback and ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Revol Press, and certain independent bookstores in Europe and North America… And maybe other places, we haven’t checked everywhere.

Adam Turl is an artist and writer in southern Illinois. They received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts and a BFA from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale (SIUC). In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. They are an editor at Locust Review and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC), and organize, with their partner, Tish Turl, the DIY art project and community space, The Born Again Labor Museum (BALM).

“Revol Press is a new author-run and oriented publisher dedicated to putting out solid left wing theory. Our goal is to revive countercultural dreaming alongside incisive materialism, emphasizing quality over ‘edgy’ content and hot takes, putting out considered yet incisive reflections in a timely manner. We aim to support established writers and discover new talent, prioritizing fair royalties, ongoing dialogue, and an emphasis on quality essays and books that promote formal and theoretical innovation. Our writers are part of a collective effort in publishing, taking a percentage of profits from all other books we produce and sell, as well as from their own. Revol is here to reassert the creative opposition of the author, as a community. Where once you paid lip service to the revolution and were considered credible, now you can build something revolutionary without compromise.”

“Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism argues against the forces of uneven and combined development of culture under capitalism. The gothic-futurist temporal displacement that Turl articulates so eloquently arises from the artist’s own experience in the entwined labors of the studio and a work history that includes janitor, dish washer, market researcher, graphic designer, typesetter, telemarketer, food service worker, gallery assistant, editor, and political organizer. The book’s vivid summary of modernist art’s avant-garde acknowledges art’s cooptation but refuses to retreat to a mournful passivity. Instead, Turl insists that it is ‘up to the working-class to regain that potential in culture,’ which can enable it to shed the strictures of a gothic capitalism.”
— Buzz Spector, artist, writer, emeritus professor.

“Gothic Capitalism reclaims art from suffocating neoliberal patronage, stale institutional capture, and a timid, hollow twenty-first-century avant-garde. Sharpened by historical urgency, Adam Turl unveils the haunted ruins of capitalist culture — where our images and ideas flicker like ghosts in the servers, where our creative flow is reduced to new blood for the vampire feed. This book is essential reading for all who refuse to surrender art’s social-spiritual power, for those who create, who reflect, and who celebrate the differentiated totality of life on this planet. Turl’s ideas are an incitement, a reckoning — and perhaps even a way forward.”
— Holly Lewis, author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection, and the forthcoming How to Think About Artificial Intelligence

“Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism is a vital critique of the extractive machinery of the contemporary art world, dissecting its ties to capitalist realism, hollow avant-gardism, and neoliberal co-optation. With sharp philosophical and political clarity, Turl exposes the contradictions of an art system that commodifies dissent while evading its own complicities. Yet this is not just a diagnosis — it’s a call to arms. Drawing on years of artistic and activist engagement, they  propose radical alternatives, urging art to reclaim its role in collective struggle. For those seeking to break from the dead ends of late capitalist aesthetics, this book is an indispensable provocation.”
— Anupam Roy, artist, recipient of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s Emerging Artist Award

“This book is at once a protest and a clearing of the path forward. Adam Turl traces the paralysis of the art world, exacerbated by social media and AI, under neoliberalism and a rising far-right, and reclaims art in a profoundly Marxist sense —  as a critique of existing conditions and the very human desire for transcendence, going back to the evolution of our species as cave painters. This is a tour de force of Marxist art history which tears down the specializations of artistic mediums and academic disciplines to reclaim the art space for staging the ghosts and lost dreams of our laboring ancestors and to imagine futures wherea capitalism has been aborted.”
— Jyotsna Kapur, co-author of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique and author of The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India: Bargaining with Capital

“Building on essays previously published in Red Wedge and Locust Review, Adam Turl’s incisive Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth summons avant-garde artists to break free from a market-driven art world whose institutions permit only capitalist dreams (and nightmares) -- and to produce art that is truly for the proletariat and its revolution. Drawing on the theory of uneven and combined development, Turl adumbrates what is gothic about contemporary capitalism and why it is experienced as such by the ‘differentiated totality’ of today’s global proletariat: while we have been launched into a cybernetic and digital future, behind this future’s techno-utopian promises lie only new modes of exploitation and domination and the uncanny, horrific return of archaic socio-economic violences. And, thus, Turl contends, today’s avant-garde must harness the power of what Turl dubs the Gothic artifact. This Gothic artifact, never to be imprisoned in the white cube of the bourgeois museum or gallery, evokes radical desires and imaginings of the past. Its vocation is to re-connect the proletariat with its history and thus to support its emancipatory struggles in the present. Gothic Capitalism is itself a form of Gothic artifact. It deftly draws on recent critiques of the neoliberal art world, of social media, and of AI to map the landscape from which it invites the avant-garde to split, but its greatest strength are its accounts of historical art that has inspired Turl’s own, from the shamanistic cave paintings and the Epic Theatre of Brecht to Ralph Fasanella’s painting and Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment. Theoretically heady (with not small dose of Walter Benjamin and Mark Fisher), but entirely accessible, Gothic Capitalism unflinchingly surveys what we are up against, but also bracingly charts a path for a new-old art. Comrades, put Gothic Capitalism on your reading group’s schedule!”
— Joe Shapiro, author of The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel