Bøger udgivet af JRP Editions

Edited by Christophe Cherix. Essays by Saul Ostrow and Willoughby Sharp.

For writer, critic and artist John Miller, the issue of the production-reception of a work of art is a genuine dialectic. He argues that the artist has no choice but to address the sociopolitical questions and the ideological apparatuses linked to the production of cultural "artefacts." Hence, his witty title, drawing attention to art as commodity. From polemical pieces to extensive theoretical essays to studies of Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Richard Artschwager and John Baldessari, the texts collected here respond to the ongoing collision of aesthetics and exchange value. Throughout, Miller draws upon his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of art history, theory and popular culture. As critic Bruce Hainley has written in Artforum, "Miller's essays are a pungent intervention into the ideologies of beauty, representation and looking."

For one year, respected critic and curator Bob Nickas put his money where his eyes are: he decided to become a collector, someone who takes art off gallery walls instead of hanging it there. His ground rules dictated that he would buy one work per month from an artist he had never written about or exhibited before. In this fascinating diary of his year on the market, he tracks the changes in his relation to art, when the commitment becomes one of the wallet and not just the mind and words. "It has affected the way I look at art," he writes. "On the one hand, if I am unwilling to part with my hard-earned money, how worthy can the art really be? On the other, there are certainly works far above my humble means... For this project, I have had to pay to have my say."