Dr.phil. Philipp Kleinmichel
philipp.kleinmichel@uni-ak.ac.at
+43-(0)1-711 33-6501 (Office)

Philipp Kleinmichel is a philosopher and scholar of art and culture. His work examines the persistence and transformation of hegemony in Western art and culture. It focuses on the contradiction between the politicization of art and theory and their role in sustaining institutions under conditions of ongoing cultural change. In a recently completed book developed as part of his habilitation, he outlines a theory of cultural transformation. His current research centers on the base/superstructure debate in art discourse as well as on artistic responses to the automation of the means of production since modernity.

He received his doctorate from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM and studied philosophy as well as art and media theory in Freiburg, Karlsruhe, and New York. His academic affiliations have included Zeppelin University, the New School for Social Research, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. He has also taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen, and the University of Hamburg.

Alongside his academic work, he has organized public seminars and reading groups in conjunction with exhibition projects for the Berlin Biennale, the Westfälischer Kunstverein, and Kunsthalle Münster. From 2018 to 2025 he also coordinated the collaborative seminar series Creativity and Performance for Zeppelin University’s artsprogram.

Selected publications: Im Namen der Kunst. Eine Genealogie der politischen Ästhetik (Vienna: Passagen, 2014); “Symbolic Excess of Art Activism,” in Karen van den Berg, Cara Jordan, and Philipp Kleinmichel (eds.), The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 211–238; “Die Ohnmacht der Bilder und das Schicksal der Logozentrismuskritik,” in Jonas Etten and Julian Jochmaring (eds.), Nach der ikonischen Wende (Berlin: Kadmos, 2021), 259–312; “The Cultural Currency of Semiocapitalism: On the General Law of Exchange,” in Joan Ramon Resina (ed.), Cultures of Currencies: Literature and the Symbolic Foundation of Money (London/New York: Routledge, 2022), 36–49; “Die Universität als Maschine. Walter Benjamins Theorie des Berufsapparats,” in Philipp Kleinmichel, Jan Söffner, Joachim Landkammer, and Rahel Spöhrer (eds.), Die Kunst der Universität: Episteme, Ästhetik, Institution (Berlin: transcript, 2024), 75–94.