Merlin Carpenter considers how “The Outside Can’t Go Outside” has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation.

“Standstill” could be the name for the exact kind of experience that is the hiatus between social expectations and real possibilities of agency. The essays of this book transverse these dimensions of standstill as an in-between of time. The book includes essays by Georges Didi-Huberman, David Lapoujade, Peter Osborne, Jacques Rancière, Christine Ross, and others as well as conversations with Via Lewandowsky, Aernout Mik and Marcel Odenbach.

Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalization, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualizing them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows tells the story of those interventions, dwelling on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.

The essays in this collection were written in the first decade of the new millennium by the critic, editor, and curator Chantal Pontbriand. Pontbriand examines themes of being-in-common in today’s world and their relation to the development of art practices.

What Is Contemporary Art? puts the apparent simplicity and self-evident term into doubt, asking critics, curators, artists, and writers to contemplate the nature of this catchall or default category.