Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion. One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously "black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers-to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability. In this engaging study, Elena Filipovic collects a vast oral history of the ephemeral action, uncovering rare images and documents, and giving us singular insight into an artist who made an art of making himself difficult to find. And through it, she reveals Bliz-aard Ball Sale to be the backbone of a radical artistic oeuvre that transforms such notions as "art," "commodity," "performance," and even "race" into categories that shift and dissolve, much like slowly melting snowballs.

The fourteen prominent analytic philosophers writing here engage with the cluster of philosophical questions raised by conceptual art. They address four broad questions: What kind of art is conceptual art? What follows from the fact that conceptual art does not aim to have aesthetic value? What knowledge or understanding can we gain from conceptual art? How ought we to appreciate conceptual art?
Conceptual art, broadly understood by the contributors as beginning with Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades and as continuing beyond the 1970s to include some of today's contemporary art, is grounded in the notion that the artist's 'idea' is central to art, and, contrary to tradition, that the material work is by no means essential to the art as such. To use the words of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, "In conceptual art the idea of the concept is the most important aspect of the work...and the execution is a perfunctory affair," Given this so-called "dematerialization" of the art object, the emphasis on cognitive value, and the frequent appeal to philosophy by many conceptual artists, there are many questions that are raised by conceptual art that should be of interest to analytic philosophers. Why, then, has so little work been done in this area? This volume is most probably the first collection of papers by analytic Anglo-American philosophers tackling these concerns head-on.
Contributors:
Margaret Boden, Diarmuid Costello, Gregory Currie, David Davies, Peter Goldie, Robert Hopkins, Matthew Kieran, Peter Lamarque, Dominic McIver Lopes, Derek Matravers, Elisabeth Schellekens, Kathleen Stock, Carolyn Wilde, and the "Art & Language" group.

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), renowned for his role in establishing Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant art movements in the postwar era, is perhaps best known for his masterful and brilliantly colored wall drawings. Throughout his career, however, LeWitt also created many remarkable three-dimensional works suitable for display in outdoor settings. In this handsome publication, which accompanies the first major career survey of LeWitt's "structures," the artist's modular works are traced from their simplest manifestation in a single large-scale cube through multiple variations, with examples from the 1960s through the 1990s. Works from the 1980s onward explore the three-dimensional possibilities of diverse geometric forms, such as stars, and the introduction of new materials, including concrete block and fiberglass, stimulating experimentation with non-geometric, irregular forms on an increasing scale. The book includes essays by Nicholas Baume and Joe Madura that provide curatorial and critical context for the structures. Additional essays by Rachel Haidu, Anna Lovatt, and Kirsten Swenson offer fresh art-historical commentary, ranging from the problematic of site for LeWitt's initial structures to the relationship between abstract conceptual systems, architecture, and urban space. Also included is a never before published conversation among the artist, Baume, and Jonathan Flatley. Stunning color plates record the works on display in Lower Manhattan's City Hall Park, supplemented by archival and historical documentation. Distributed for the Public Art Fund, New York City Exhibition Schedule: City Hall Park, New York (05/24/11-12/02/11)

Paintings, installations, sculptures and photographs from around fifty artists compose a chronological course of the different currents of non-conformist art in the former U.S.S.R and Russia. The Tretyakov Collection was created between 1983 and 2008 on the initiative of Russian art critic Andrei Erofeev to create a museum of the history of art mavericks in Moscow, as no Soviet institution was interested in the avant-garde. Originally composed of more than 5000 pieces, a selection of this collection eventually became part of the Tretyakov National Gallery, making it the first institution to house a department of Russian contemporary art. The exhibition thus allows a new dive in to this 'Underground' of the years 1960-2000. Each chapter brings together artists from the same movement and highlights their affinity with Tachism, kinetic art, Pop Art, conceptual art, or performance. The composition of the collection, revealing the sometimes-complex relationships between artists, official art of the Soviet era and institutions, will be evoked by historical documents, chronological friezes and an educational program. Text in English and French.

In the fateful month of March 2000, shortly after opening a hugely successful show in New York that unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of Presidential candidate George W. Bush, the hugely ambitious Conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide. With museums lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought relentlessly at last within his reach, speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder has titillated the art world ever since. Lombardi was an enigma who was at once a compulsive truth-teller and a cunning player of the art game, a political operative and a stubborn independent, a serious artist and a Merry Prankster, a metaphysicist if not a scientist.Lombardi's spidery, elusive diagrams describing the evolution of the shadow-banking industry from a decades-old alliances between intelligence agencies, banking, government and organized crime, may have made him unique in art history as the only artist whose primary subject, the CIA, has turned around and studied him and his art work. Exhaustively researched, this is the first comprehensive biography of this immensely contradictory and brilliantly original artist whose pervasive influence in not only the art world, but also in the world of computer science and cyber-security is only now coming to light.

A FAMILY STORY AND THE TALE OF A NATION. Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - weaves a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own life and that of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. 'Engrossing...a remarkable story' Sunday Times Here, through the sweeping lens of his own and his father's life, Ai Weiwei tells an epic tale of China over the last 100 years, from the Cultural Revolution to the modern-day Chinese Communist Party. Here is the story of a childhood spent in desolate exile after his father, Ai Qing, once China's most celebrated poet, fell foul of the authorities. Here is his move to America as a young man and his return to China, his rise from unknown to art-world superstar and international rights activist. Here is his extraordinary account of how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. It's the story of a father and a son, of exceptional creativity and passionate belief, and of how two indomitable spirits enabled the world to understand their country. 'A story of inherited resilience and self-determination' Observer 'A majestic and exquisitely serious masterpiece about his China... One of the great voices of our time' Andrew Solomon 'Intimate, unflinching...an instant classic' Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

"All the work of the 1970s involved a kind of doubling; there was the world of the everyday and there was the world of the represented ...a sense of our experiential worlds becoming bifurcated between image and reality." John Stezaker This is the first publication to explore the rich history of conceptual art in Britain during its most exciting and innovative period, from the mid 1960s to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It examines how the early works of this period took the form of a challenge to art's traditional boundaries and how by the mid 1970s, focus had shifted away from issues of art and individual experience towards questions of politics and identity, using the languages of documentary, propaganda and advertising in the service of action. After introducing the reader to the origins of this radical moment in British art, the book goes on to explore the textual work of Art & Language, Victor Burgin and others; the 'New Sculpture' being produced by those such as Richard Long and Michael Craig-Martin who questioned the traditional art object; and the artists who addressed society and politics, including Stephen Willats and Margaret Harrison.A final chapter deals with the key role of photography, film and print - revealing them to be key modes of dissemination and international exchange with Europe and America. Essays are complemented by in-focus texts on the most significant works and previously unpublished archival material. Featuring contributions by experts in the field, this is the key book on the subject for students, scholars and all those with an

A volume considering questions of conservation that arise with new artistic mediums and practices. Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms-such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components-that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved. This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object-Event-Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.