Fair Play enters into a field of scholarly responses to socially engaged and relational art and performance practices (alongside Shannon Jackson, Claire Bishop, Nicolas Bourriaud and others) with a laudable end in sight: ‘to contextualize these socially engaged art and performance practices in broader social and material contexts’ (p. 10). The book's fundamental aims, grounded in a methodological approach that engages cultural materialism and actor-network theory, are, broadly, twofold: first, to identify, analyse and evaluate the opportunities and experiences offered to participating audiences in such work; second, to explore ‘how those opportunities are affected by the practices’ social and material contexts’ (p. 10; cf. pp. 24–5). In this regard, there are favourable resonances with Jackson's Social Works, but argued more forthrightly from the position of a sceptic concerned about the complicity of art's ‘social-work’ aspirations with a neoliberal capitalist culture and agenda – albeit a sceptic who strives to maintain faith in the ‘heady promise of enormous social value’ that these practices often imply or claim (p. 1).

The book comprises four chapters: the first looks at how labour circulates in contemporary art and performance, through artists delegating responsibility either onto (frequently underpaid or unpaid) other artists, or onto participating, co-creating audiences; the second addresses the ‘artrepreneur’ – Harvie's preferred term for creative entrepreneurs (which acknowledges currency as a neologism in Evelyne Brink's recently published book The Artrepreneur) – as an arts worker, imbricated in a cultural economy, who models neoliberal values, especially entrepreneurialism; the third focuses on space and social relations, especially with regard to gentrification and social fragmentation; and the fourth and final chapter addresses arts funding, particularly shifts in the UK towards mixed economic funding models (exemplified in the coalition's Catalyst match-funding scheme) and their significance for UK ‘arts ecology and for understandings and practices of society and social responsibility’ (p. 152).

Each chapter contains both sceptical and hopeful reflections on the state of socially engaged art today, set in compellingly detailed economic and political context, primarily post-1979. For this reader, though, Harvie's persuasive optimism was outweighed by the shear forcefulness and rigour of a more disconcerting evaluative brew. This brew takes as its toxic ingredients a series of infrastructural, institutional and cultural alignments with a neoliberal agenda, thereby potentially poisoning the social alternatives envisaged in socially engaged artworks. I was reminded of the Boalian notion of art as a rehearsal for social change, only geared into a starkly opposing sense of that rehearsal: that is, with socially engaged art pitched as that which rehearses, naturalizes and prepares audiences for ‘the harmful conditions of labour’ (p. 50). Perhaps more of a case could have been made to balance the scales more in faith's favour. But, moreover, the reader is left with a sobering sense of urgency: that there is much in want of remedy and much to resist with regard to the threat of a neoliberalized arts infrastructure, albeit one that is not intrinsically neoliberal or intrinsically bad (hence the hope).

Harvie's claims are in many ways reflected in the book itself. This is a meticulously crafted book in sync with the author's inspirational commentary on craftsmanship. Not in spite, but because, of her well-crafted critique, Harvie's commitment to social welfare emerges clearly in a volume that is not only excellently and meticulously researched but also brilliantly written.