Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness.

Today, the art world is not dominated by a small group of insiders. According to Graw, the art economy has been transformed from a retail business into an industry that produces visuality and meaning. Written during both the height of the most recent art boom in early 2008 and its sudden collapse thereafter, High Price upholds a unique position towards the art world’s inner contradictions between symbolic meaning and monetary value.

A fundamental reordering of artistic production and a transformation of the art field are about to take place. Independent education programs, self-organized urban planning, and artistic practices in the field of scientific research, among other initiatives, have unfolded over the last few years. This publication addresses this wide field, focusing on theoretical reflections and insights into alternative artistic working models.

Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets maps and analyzes the complex and contested entanglements of contemporary art and its commercial markets.

The 60th Jahresring takes the form of a compilation of artist interviews and offers a snapshot of a highly active art scene that stretches from Berlin, as a new international center for art. Nicolaus Schafhausen put a series of questions to thirty-one art practitioners, less geared toward the artists’ respective praxis and more toward the conditions under which it arises.