Dr Daniel Neofetou

Lecturer in Visual Cultures Design (Research)

Daniel Neofetou

  • School Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries

  • Department School of Design

  • Location London

Research activities

Daniel Neofetou's research is centrally concerned with the question of aesthetic autonomy, understood not in formalist terms but in relation to how the sphere of artistic production and reception contrasts with or reproduces the mediation of experience under capitalism.

His main areas of expertise are modern and contemporary art and cinema; philosophical aesthetics in the German Idealist tradition, with a particular focus on the work of Theodor W. Adorno; and late-modernist art criticism and its afterlives.


Current Teaching

Year 1

GDN1007 Creative Media and Cultures

Year 2

GDN2300 Socially Responsible and Future-oriented Design


Biography

Daniel Neofetou is the author of the monographs Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War (Bloomsbury, 2021), and Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator (Zero Books, 2012). He has published widely in both the popular and academic press. With respect to the former, he has contributed to The Wire, Art Monthly, Artforum, Mute, and Flash Art. With respect to the latter, his research has appeared in Journal of Contemporary Painting, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Arts, Getty Research Journal and Philosophy & Social Criticism.

As a filmmaker, Neofetou wrote and directed the 2024 short film Promulgate, which has achieved awards and nominations at several film festivals, including Venice Shorts, Luleå International Film Festival, and Milano Indie Movie Awards.

Neofetou is also active in artistic curation and practice. He has organised shows and events at both institutional and independent spaces, including Divine Cargo, an evening of performance art at the South London Gallery in 2018; Get Out of My Office, a group show at AM Gallery, also in 2018; and Burgess Park Sculpture Garden in September 2023. From 2018 to 2022, he also co-organised Sector 7G, a series of avant-garde club events, at which he regularly performed. He maintains a close affiliation with Artists Self Publishers' Fair, where since 2019 he has presented an ongoing zine series entitled Painters Say the Funniest Things, co-authored with arts writer Lizzie Homersham. Other projects to which he has contributed include the 2020 experimental collaborative platform Free Cash Radio by artists Ruth Angel Edwards and Adam Gallagher, and the 2018-2020 touring publication-as-exhibition The Annotated Reader, curated by Ryan Gander.

He achieved his PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, for a thesis entitled 'Eyes in the Heat: The Question Concerning Abstract Expressionism,' initially under the supervision of Mark Fisher, and subsequently under the supervision of Josephine Berry and Marina Vishmidt.

Publications

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