In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated “Les Immatériaux” at Centre Georges Pompidou. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication, and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory.

How did art escape the deadlock of the Situationists’ anti-art refusal? Did the relational artists, with their repetitions of Situationist slogans and techniques, outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative to Guy Debord’s dream of surpassing art and realizing philosophy? Looking back at some of the Situationists’ confrontations with the museum, this book traces a path beyond the tragedy of negativity and the litany of recuperation.

As a Weasel Sucks Eggs examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains readings of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf.

Daniel Birnbaum’s The Hospitality of Presence is a study of the concept of otherness in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In the late 1990s it gained international attention in academic circles. It was reviewed favorably in specialized philosophy journals such as Review of Metaphysics and quoted extensively, most notably by Paul Ricoeur in one of the legendary French thinker’s last books.

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

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.”

An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition is a collective portrait of Hans Ulrich Obrist composed by friends, collaborators, admirers, and inquisitors. From personal anecdotes to analytic estimations to visual representations, the contributions respond to the questions that frame the book: Who is HUO? What does HUO do? What has HUO done?

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.

First published in German in 1987, this is artist and writer Jutta Koether’s meditation on painting. In novella form, f. follows several disembodied female characters as they consider velvet, coral, the curtain, money, color, red.

Ulf Linde is without doubt one of the world’s most important interpreters of Marcel Duchamp’s art. For more than half a century, he has pursued intense studies of Duchamp’s entire oeuvre and has made perfect replicas of all his major works. His as-yet unpublished manuscript scrutinizing the mathematical principles behind Duchamp’s art reveals what Linde claims to be the key to Duchamp’s poetic universe.

Painting has demonstrated remarkable perseverance in the expanding field of contemporary art and the surrounding ecology of media images. It appears, however, to have dispelled its own once-uncontested material basis: no longer confined to being synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting instead tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation.

This book brings together contributions from the eponymous conference, all of which seek to speculate on the reasons as to why, since the turn of the millennium, we have encountered so many artworks that tend to reconcile Minimalism with suggestions of the human figure.

Adapted from the lecture she delivered at the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s essay explores the dimension of self-reflexivity in the work of eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Siméon Chardin.

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.

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.

Comprised of a lecture by Christoph Menke and two respective responses to it by Daniel Loick and Isabelle Graw, The Power of Judgment both attests to the importance of judgment in art criticism and argues against its determining verdicts.

Thinking Worlds brings together contributions from a two-stage symposium organized in connection with the 2nd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. These essays address questions of the sense and purpose of the “event” in contemporary artistic culture, of the current status of philosophy and aesthetic theory, and of the political significance of artistic interventions.

Under Pressure gathers together the contributions to the same-titled conference held at the Institut für Kunstkritik from 2006–07. Starting from the premise that cultural producers are currently more exposed to external pressures, the conferences proposed that today these external constraints have to be considered as an integral part of artistic production.

“If art takes place in a contemporary art museum (where we expect it), what does it mean? Art should not be about filling spaces, but about necessities and urgencies.” Such are the principles conveyed by the visionary Hans Ulrich Obrist, seeking out ways to reinvent and invent museums of the 21st century.