Today, with the total availability and saturation of images, the museum has lost its privileged status as the exclusive place for the display of art. In our age of digital media, how is a particular artwork selected for a museum collection? Which symbolic criteria must this artwork satisfy for it to obtain value? And in what ways does the institution of the museum remain relevant?

The first in the series of e-flux journal readers to be written by a single author, Going Public brings together a collection of influential essays by Boris Groys.

This book of interviews and conversations with today’s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today’s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics.

This inter- and trans-disciplinary collection of essays by philosophers, artists, critics, and art historians, reconsiders the place of the aesthetic in contemporary art, with reference to four main themes: aesthetics as “sensate thinking”; the dissolution of artistic limits; post-autonomous practices; and exhibition-values in a global art world.

Since the mid-1990s, contemporary art has been booming like never before. There is more of everything—more artists, more collectors, more galleries, more art fairs, more museums, more biennials … with one exception: criteria with which the art of the moment can be understood, judged, praised and, if need be, damned.