In his first collection of essays, David Levi Strauss addresses the always conflicted relation between aesthetics and politics by concentrating on specific instances – from allopathic art to Desert Storm propaganda, from Columbus’s legacy to Robert Smithson’s prophecies, and from new art in post-Soviet Russia to public art in the United States – and by focusing on the work of artists such as various as Grunewald, Jean Genet, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Goddard and Anne-Marie Mieville, Carolee Schneemann, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Daniel Joseph Martinez. “In these fierce and lyrical essays, Strauss calls for an art – and implicitly for an approach to art writing – that is passionately experiential, intellectually grounded, and politically fearless. Anyone looking for a space of cultural possibility in this moment of complicity and collusion should start here.”