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.

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled Kunsthalle Bern’s rooms with transit blankets stretched over identically scaled frames, each named after one of the artist’s seven galleries and marked “not for sale.” This publication documents these “paintings,” how the works thematize the limbo of the “midcareer” artist, as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.

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.

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.

Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte is a screenplay that cannot be a film; it is a film that can only be on paper. If the property of a film producer, Bernadette Corporation claims Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte would be left derelict, abandoned to vagabonds and squatters. It is intended as a narrative of messy revenge, ruined by the screenplay form.