In the last two hundred years, “art” has become one of the most fetishized concepts in Western civilization. The idea according to which certain people—also known as artists—would provide the world with their inner vision is a modern myth, but has proved to be a contemporary reality. Since so much art now considers itself as cultural production, mystical creation has been turned into a minority paradigm.

New York Conversations is a text film. Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for this occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, the film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators, and a free floating public.

For the last decade, Markus Weisbeck has been redefining the prevailing client-designer relationship and subsequently challenging what constitutes a graphic design practice today. This pocket book presents a selection of seminal graphic design projects developed by Weisbeck and his firm, Surface, over the last ten years.

Writer, DJ, and sound artist Jean-Yves Leloup has followed the evolution of electronic music from its first appearance in Europe at the end of the eighties. A fortunate witness to the electronic scene, he is also interested in all questions relative to contemporary art and digital technologies.

Anton Vidokle is an artist who captures the attention of 70,000 people each day through e-flux, as well as unitednationsplaza, Martha Rosler Library, and other projects. The essays and interview in this book highlight how two threads in Vidokle’s practice—unobtrusiveness and the freedom of self-sufficiency—are often interwoven, and are at the center of an intellectual proposal that undermines common assumptions about making art.

This book explores contemporary publishing in its broadest, most exploded sense. The first part of this book consists of pieces of writings written since the conception of Dexter Sinister’s New York basement workshop and bookstore in the summer of 2006. The second part consists of reproductions of a series of lithographic proof prints.

If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.

This book discusses Michael Sailstorfer’s most recent work, with a special focus on issues of space and site specificity.

In several theoretical essays, dialogues on collaborative projects and reflections on his own work, the architect Nikolaus Hirsch explores the critical transformations of contemporary space and its effects on spatial practice.

Pecafil discusses issues of art in public space and the social-political implications of Michael Beutler’s work.

In all of his works the Danish artist demonstrates an interest in an expanded notion of ecology, one that encompasses cultural history and sociopolitics as well as natural resources.

In the essay Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud discusses how, since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products.

Giving the Story a Treatment is the first comprehensive publication on Canadian artist Alex Morrison. Best known for his documentations on the skater culture, Morrison’s videos, photographs and drawings reveal the growing aestheticisation of the political within the cultural spectrum.

Cosmograms is conceived as an extension of Melik Ohanian’s film Seven Minutes Before (2004), a cinematic allegory of both the exhaustion of a certain narrative form and the new privilege accorded to space over time. Collecting twenty-three texts by authors from diverse fields of investigation and research, Cosmograms attempts to map the multiple coordinates of this new spatial paradigm.

A philosophical essay on time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum’s Chronology was presented in frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence.”

“Cerith Wyn Evans” provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s body of work.

In Four or Five Roses, some 45 narratives by children are presented in the form of a monologue. Edited from numerous interviews and conversations recorded on playgrounds in South Africa, Peter Friedl creates a hybrid genre that is both fictionalised speech and serious counter-voice.

In his seminal essay, author George Baker links Gerard Byrne’s work to theater and notes that the presence of avant-garde dramatist Bertolt Brecht has never been less discussed, but more widely explored, than in the last decade of artistic practice.

The central theme of Changing Society: Lithuania is the state of transition in a Post-Soviet state, which has achieved political stability but is still looking for appropriate images to portray itself in the domestic spheres of politics and society.

Neue Kunstkritik (New Art Criticism) documents a symposium held at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in September 1999.

Dutch artists Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij received international recognition for their seemingly luxurious and self-reflexive 35mm films. This first comprehensive monograph discusses how Dutch painting, Minimal Art, and film conventions become the backdrop for a “cinema in its decontextualized form.”

Urlaub constitutes Genzken’s multilayered inquiry into the meaning of work and leisure. “Artists never take vacations,” Genzken says, “but the entire art system urgently needs a vacation.”

five or six contains texts selected from more than 100 reviews, articles, and catalogue essays published by Liam Gillick since 1989. The book includes some of the formal, social, and ideological concerns that have merged in Gillick’s “What if? Scenario.”