Matters of value and judgment are the subject of recently intensified debate within art criticism. Has art criticism suffered a collective failure of nerve as names and styles boom and bust with increasing rapidity? Conversely, does a discourse that traffics in value judgments risk being coopted into serving--or perhaps even serve outright--as a consumer guide to a bloated contemporary art market in which commerce and critical discourse frequently seem to be at odds with each other? Growing out of a forum that was held in Vancouver, Canada, "Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism" includes transcripts of the forum's discussions, an extensive bibliography on art criticism, as well as newly commissioned texts by Jeff Derksen, Diedrich Diederichsen, James Elkins, Maria Fusco, Sven Lutticken, Tom Morton, Kristina Lee Podesva, William Wood and Tirdad Zolghadr.

In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker about the exhibition No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984-1989 at David Zwirner in New York, "the show's cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era." With an eye to canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of international art scenes that were based in Cologne-arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time-and New York. While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner, and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler, and Monika Spruth showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. The works of these German artists were exhibited along with the latest contemporary art from the US by artists like Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the works of German artists were presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring, Augustine & Hodes, and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work being produced and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this ongoing dialogue, among them Europa / Amerika (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1986) and A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland (New Museum, New York, 1986). Big, bold, and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color over one hundred immensely varied artworks by the twenty-two international artists included in this massive exhibition-one of the largest in David Zwirner's history. Beyond its stunning visual components, the book features crucial new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, and an illustrated chronology of the decade by Kara Carmack. The book also includes an arsenal of compelling archival material, from documentary photographs from the period to reproductions of Cologne's culture magazine Spex. Taken as a whole, this ambitious exhibition catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart, and "dissonance of styles"-in the words of Schjeldahl-embodied by this fascinating and fecund moment in global art history. Artists featured in the book include Werner Buttner, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Gunther Foerg, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Albert Oehlen, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, and Christopher Wool.

The first-ever monograph on Reynaud-Dewar, one of today’s most celebrated multimedia artists

French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar creates environments and situations in which she uses her own body to examine the dual experience of vulnerability and empowerment that results from acts of exposing oneself to the world. Evolving through a range of media such as performance, video, installation, sound, and literature, her work considers the fluid border between public and private space, challenging conventions related to the body, sexuality, power relations, and institutional spaces. This is the first book to document her remarkable career.

In 1995, Mike Kelley devised the Educational Complex, an amalgam of every school he attended and of the house he grew up in, "with all the parts I couldn't remember left out"--a total environment, "sort of like the model of a Modernist community college." The blind spots in this model represent forgotten ("repressed") zones, and so are reconceived by Kelley as sites of institutional abuse, for which specific traumas were devised (each having their own video and sculptural component). For Kelley, this work marks the beginning of a series of projects in which pseudo-autobiography, repressed-memory syndrome and the reinterpretation of previous pieces become the tools for a poetic deconstruction of such complexes and the way we interact with and narrate them. "Educational Complex Onwards, 1995-2008" is the first book to collect these works. Each project within the series is extensively documented by artist's texts and reference material, while essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Howard Singerman and Anne Pontegnie examine the place of this body of work within Kelley's oeuvre.