Une vraie fausse biennale imaginée par Maurizio Cattelan sur le site de l'île antillaise de St. Kitts. Des artistes dans un hôtel, partagent les repas, la plage, les bains, effaçant toute trace d'art...

The alienation between modern high culture and its public is a fundamental conflict of art. This book develops a theory of contemporary art in response to our moment, when artists and critics must respond to art's unprecedented popularity. Close readings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Rancière, Theodor W. Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Benjamin Buchloh, and Boris Groys provide the theoretical framework to comprehend a dialectic of art propelled by tension between the enduring history of art and the domineering presence of mass culture. "In dialogue with some of the most interesting modern and contemporary philosophical figures, Bettina Funcke traces the divisions and alternations in twentieth-century art between high and low engagements with popular forms. She reveals fascinatingly how twentieth-century artists not only seek to engage the people but also problematize 'the people' as a political and cultural construct." -- Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude "In this far-ranging, muscular book, Bettina Funcke persuasively argues for a renewed attention to the dialectical relationship between high culture and mass culture. Against the notion that the two domains have become wholly indistinguishable, Funcke posits a stubborn, even agonistic sphere still discernable between them; in her account, it is the praxis of 'contemporary art' that both embodies and reflects upon this condition. Skillfully delivering a complex history of the longstanding, slippery debates around hierarchical and repressive structures of culture, Funcke moves through two centuries of philosophical and art historical discourse. Tending to canonical--and often contradictory--premises by authors including Buchloh, Derrida, Foucault, and Greenberg and to still-ambiguous and heavily debated artistic practices like those of Beuys and Warhol, Funcke's analysis extends, with great implication, into the philosophical and artistic details of our own moment. In Pop or Populus, Funcke delivers a cohesive, suggestive narrative that takes up the central issues of contemporary culture and refuses to consider any history a closed case." --Johanna Burton, art historian and critic, Associate Director and Senior Faculty, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York Bettina Funcke studied philosophy, art history, and media theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, and has lectured at Bard College, Columbia University, Yale University, and the ZKM. Her writings have been published widely, both in artist monographs and magazines including Afterall, Artforum, Bookforum, Public, and Texte zur Kunst. A co-founder of The Leopard Press and the Continuous Project group, Funcke has worked as an editor at Dia Art Foundation and recently as Senior Editor U.S., Parkett. Translated from the German by Warren Niesluchowski

The Psycho-Geography of Our Urban Existence Since the 1990s, artist and filmmaker Sarah Morris has created a body of work that has been inspired by her interest in the psychology of urban environments. Her complex abstractions, which derive their vivid colors from each city's unique vocabulary and palette, trace the social and bureaucratic topologies of contemporary cities to reveal the architecturally encoded politics. In her films-a parallel practice intimately intertwined with her painting-Morris further explores the psycho-geography and the dynamic nature of cities in flux through multi-layered and fragmented narratives. She purposely leaves her work open for interpretation, conveying a heightened sense to the viewer of both our complicity in a larger system and an increasingly disorienting experience of modern urban existence. Featuring more than 60 paintings, including impressions of the 15 films to date, drawings, as well as an in-depth interview with the artist and two major essays, the catalogue offers the first comprehensive overview of Morris's oeuvre.

In his both visually seductive and irritating photographic and filmic works, Elad Lassry, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1977 and lives and works in Los Angeles, explores canonical ideas about the use of images as influenced by various technologies And The history of the media. Elad Lassry's photographs – everyday and design objects, fruit and vegetable still lifes, human and animal portraits, landscapes and cityscapes – allude to visual features and image constructions that have been used in photography, advertising, magazines and illustrated books, and in films. What interests him in this context is analogue source material and duplication methods, And The development of different types of images in the history of the image before they were incorporated into the digital flood of the now omnipresent archive of available images. His photographic works, which do not usually exceed the format of a magazine or printed material, comprise either collages of acquired printed matter or newly-composed photographs. Lassry's photographs make use of the attractiveness of the familiarity of these images. However, they are almost too intensely coloured, too abstract, too staged. In addition to this process of visual emphasis, they are presented in matching coloured frames, which, On yet another level, critically thematicize the relationship between the image And The 'picture' as a utilitarian object, and refer To The history of the presentation of objects as art And The aestheticization of perception. They prompt distortions, and therefore, ruptures in the stereotype And The customary – in both temporal and interpretational terms – process of our perception of images. The book is the first monograph dedicated To The artist's work and is published in the Kunsthalle Zurich series.

Although best known for his influential work in sculpture, video, and writing, Seth Price has always made drawings and maquettes as a way to explore ideas developed in his other bodies of work. This book documents a group of these rarely seen works selected by curator Achim Hochdorfer for exhibition at Petzel East, New York. Spanning more than fifteen years, the art here encompasses media and materials that range from watercolor, airbrush and spray-paint, to collage and fabric. Examples include drawings of Depression-era landscapes, acetate and enamel maquettes, graffiti-marker paintings on shrink-wrapped palettes and research notes for an apocalyptic, Evangelical sci-fi novel. Price has made annotations throughout the book, recounting the context in which these works were made.