"Boris Groys is an extraordinarily gimlet-eyed observer of the impact visual art has on contemporary art-world institutions. Anyone interested in the balance of aesthetic and political power among artists, collectors, curators, and the audience needs to read Groys's lapidary essays."
- Gregg M. Horowitz, Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
"Boris Groys produces more provocations, more paradoxes per page than any other critic.
Here, in one short book, are radical propositions about religion (that it represents perfect
'opinionlessness' and is therefore the medium par excellence), the autonomy of art (that it is guaranteed by the absence of aesthetic judgment), political art (that it does not exist in the contemporary art market), Communist-era art (that it is invisible to the West because it lacked a market structure), art theory (that the hope of avoiding it entails a theory of race), and images of war and terror (that they are the new iconophilia, the new visual authority).
All these unexpected propositions are made in the hope of a slow, complex, incremental return to authorship, authority, presence, and the sublime."
- James Elkins, author of What Happened to Art Criticism?
"This magisterial overview situates contemporary art-its aesthetic strategies, institutions and drives-within the deeper context of the Modernist revolution, urbanism, new technologies, and the post-Communist era, Groys combines revelatory analysis with philosophical questions that go to the heart of cultural production today."
- Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery