The Populism Reader accompanies Populism, an exhibition project in four European cities (Vilnius, Oslo, Amsterdam, Frankfurt am Main) exploring the relationships between contemporary art and current populist cultural and political trends.

The alienation between modern high culture and its public is a fundamental conflict of art. This book develops a theory of contemporary art in response to our moment, when artists and critics must respond to art’s unprecedented popularity.

Calling for a reassessment of the function of art in late capitalist society, Corporate Mentality focuses on the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production inhabits corporate processes, abandoning the autonomy of the artwork in order to elaborate resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns.

Compiled here for the first time, the critic, artist, gallerist, dealer, translator John Kelsey’s selected essays gamesomely convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates.

This publication constitutes the first comprehensive documentation of the work of British artist Liam Gillick. With numerous illustrations and a seminal essay by Michael Archer, the book traces Gillick’s works from the beginning in the late 1980s up to the present.