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Since Marcel Duchamp created his “readymades” a century ago—most famously christening a urinal as a fountain— the practice of incorporating commodity objects into art has become ever more pervasive. Uncommon Goods traces one particularly important aspect of that progression: the shift in artistic concern toward the hidden ethical dimensions of global commerce. Jaimey Hamilton Faris discusses the work of, among many others, Ai Weiwei, Cory Arcangel, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Santiago Sierra, reading their artistic explorations as overlapping with debates about how common goods hold us and our world in common. The use of readymade now registers concerns about international migrant labor, outsourced manufacturing, access to natural resources, intellectual copyright, and the commoditization of virtual space.

In each chapter, Hamilton Faris introduces artists who exemplify the focus of readymade aesthetics on aspects of global commodity culture, including consumption, marketing, bureaucracy, labor, and community. She explores how materially intensive, “uncommon” aesthetic situations can offer moments to meditate on the kinds of objects, experiences, and values we ostensibly share in the age of globalization. The resulting volume will be an important contribution to scholarship on readymade art as well as to the study of materiality, embodiment, and globalization.

What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, Under a Bad Sign explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture.

In this lively exploration, Jonathan Munby takes a uniquely broad view, laying bare the way the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. Munby traces the legacy of badness in Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes’s detective fiction and in Claude McKay, Julian Mayfield, and Donald Goines’s urban experience writing. Ranging from Peetie Wheatstraw’s gangster blues to gangsta rap, he also examines criminals in popular songs. Turning to the screen, the underworld films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper, the 1970s blaxploitation cycle, and the 1990s hood movie come under his microscope as well. Ultimately, Munby concludes that this tradition has been a misunderstood aspect of African American civic life and that, rather than undermining black culture, it forms a rich and enduring response to being outcast in America.

Fame-shaming suggests that those who identify as women and openly pursue public recognition transgress the bounds of propriety and good taste. In Unseemly, Lorraine York analyzes fame-hunger accusations that have been directed at “fame whores” and “drama queens” from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, showing how these women have creatively handled such accusations. From Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Barbara Strozzi, Eliza Haywood, and Sarah Bernhardt to Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Kim Kardashian, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, York shows how fame-shaming has been informed by expectations of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

The unease that gives rise to public shaming of women who desire fame, says York, is a reaction to their skillful use of emergent media, whether print, film, secular song, science fiction, reality television, political speech, or social media. Fame hunger is not, as some assume, the last refuge of the untalented. To the contrary, women who have been accused of an unseemly thirst for celebrity turn out to be especially adept at emergent and boundary-breaking forms of cultural expression.