Contemporary art is deeply nostalgic, haunted by a time when “in-the-flesh” experiences of it held profound social importance. But did it ever really play such a role? In Art Was Never There: Nostalgia and the Creative Act, Mitch Speed asks whether contemporary art is doomed to become an obsolete curiosity, or if it can act as a site of resistance against an algorithmically driven culture industry that fuels alienation and wreaks havoc on the earth. Traveling through histories of artistic practice and thought, Speed traces the mechanisms through which art’s search for a lost purpose gives way to a populist pseudo-authenticity. In this way, the book shows how contemporary art figures in the political struggles of our time, and in particular how left- and right-wing politics are equally enthralled by nostalgia. Art Was Never There shuttles between new writing and quotation, using its own textual form to navigate past and present, fantasy, and the real.