Product Description: Using well-used genres like figurative painting, travel photography and landscape, John Miller has, since the 1970s, challenged the function of the author and the concomitant loss of aura for the artwork. He has regularly shifted his practice, actively resisting the reduction of his work to any critical tag...read more

Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique -- as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks -- institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003 -- including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title -- both documents and represents her work.The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical "artistic practice" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.

Conceptual art was one of the most influential art movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book Alexander Alberro traces its origins to the mid-1960s, when its principles were first articulated by the artists Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and others. One of Alberro's central arguments is that the conceptual art movement was founded not just by the artists but also by the dealer Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub promoted the artists, curated groundbreaking shows, organized symposia and publications, and in many ways set the stage for another kind of entrepreneur: the freelance curator. Alberro examines both Siegelaub's role in launching the careers of artists who were making "something from nothing" and his tactful business practices, particularly in marketing and advertising.Alberro draws on close readings of artworks produced by key conceptual artists in the mid- to late 1960s. He places the movement in the social context of the rebellion against existing cultural institutions, as well as the increased commercialization and globalization of the art world. The book ends with a discussion of one of Siegelaub's most material and least ephemeral contributions, the Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, which he wrote between 1969 and 1971. Designed to limit the inordinate control of collectors, galleries, and museums by increasing the artist's rights, the Agreement unwittingly codified the overlap between capitalism and the arts.

The complex and influential career of Robert Smithson is presented in a richly illustrated study that also includes essays by Smithson scholars and photographs of his works, exploring his artistic output in the context of the 1960s and in subsequent decades.

The complex and influential career of Robert Smithson is presented in a richly illustrated study that also includes essays by Smithson scholars and photographs of his works, exploring his artistic output in the context of the 1960s and in subsequent decades. Simultaneous.

Product Description: Recording Conceptual Art features a highly provocative series of previously unpublished interviews conducted in early 1969 with some of the most dynamic, daring, and innovative artists of the tumultuous 1960s. The nine individuals—eight artists and one art dealer—are now known as major contributors to Conceptual art...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The internationally renowned artist Dan Graham is widely acknowledged as one of the leading members of the 1960s conceptual art movement. However, his subsequent work in photography, performance, film, video and the fusion of art and architecture, though well known in Europe and Japan, is less well known in English-speaking countries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Martha Rosler traces an undefined journey along an undefined road, sequencing a number of photographs taken from a moving car.

Product Description: Recording Conceptual Art features a highly provocative series of previously unpublished interviews conducted in early 1969 with some of the most dynamic, daring, and innovative artists of the tumultuous 1960s. The nine individuals―eight artists and one art dealer―are now known as major contributors to Conceptual art...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)