Series: Hatje Cantz Text

Following on the widely-read The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, which explored how museums are changing through conversations with today's generation of museum directors, New York-based author and cultural strategy advisor András Szántó's new compilation turns its attention to architects. The conclusion of The Future of the Museum was that the "software" of art museums has evolved. Museum leaders...

How is art criticism to be understood within an expanding artistic field? A look at its history and its manifestations within globalised conditions shows the variety of the genre, of the criteria and of the styles of writing. Why Art Criticism? A Reader is an attempt to bring a diverse range of art-critical voices and perspectives into conversation with each...

Over a period of two years, Katharina Grosse and author Klaus Dermutz met in the artist's Berlin studio to conduct a series of very concentrated, lengthy conversations. This volume brings together ten in-depth interviews that delve deeper into central themes of Grosse's artistic work, such as the haptic image, the border, reversal, repetition without origin, interruption, the visible and the...

An Encounter Between Art and the Technosphere Proprietary algorithms, secret data troves, and inscrutable systems rule the day. How is this registered in art? In Poetics of Encryption Nadim Samman explores works that highlight the hidden dimensions of our technological landscape. Running counter to erroneous claims regarding a new culture of transparency and openness, such artworks address black sites, black...

The photobook visually and materially contextualises arrangements of photographs and brings them into a sensually tangible form. The book format, the materiality of the paper, and the type of binding have just as much effect on the viewer as the selection of images, their positioning in the layout, typography, and texts. The artist and theorist, Bettina Lockemann, provides an approach...

If data is the greatest collective treasure of a digital society, the basic material for business and politics: Why are the places where it is stored still so invisible? In Server Manifesto, Niklas Maak, an architectural critic and Professor for Architecture at Städelschule Frankfurt, explores this question in his new publication and envisions radical solutions for the future.

How do geopolitical, economical, and socio-political upheavals impact the field of art today? Art in a Multipolar World takes a look at how the increasing multipolarity of our world affects art. It is a diagnosis of the socio-political contexts that surround art and questions what the upheavals in geopolitics, economic, and social policy mean for the field of art today....

The Arab art scene from the 1960s to the 1990s. Story of Water and Fire is a captivating account of the joint life of two prominent figures in the Iraqi art scene, poet and art critic May Muzaffar and artist Rafa Nasiri. This book offers a glimpse into the social and artistic milieu of Baghdad from the 1960s to the...

No Going Back Skin in the Game follows on from the acclaimed fieldwork diary, The Metabolic Museum. In this new book, written in a conversational style, Clémentine Deliss expands on how artists today understand the creativity to be found in historical research collections. Questions are raised on how to work with contentious collections, the law from the perspective of Indigenous...

What happens when you not only observe one of the most famous artists of our time but do so in the company of one of the best art historians, as well? You get an unusual publication, the reading of which opens the eyes in the truest sense of the phrase. In this book, the American art historian Richard Shiff—with his...

How to transcend land grab economies, even by means of art? The reader REALTY moves from the safety of critique to the vulgarity of suggestions. The pandemic's effect on mobility presents a historic opportunity. Rarely has criticism of our extractive artworld logic of one-place-after-another been louder. REALTY is a long-term curatorial program by Tirdad Zolghadr, initially commissioned by the KW...

Berlin's Gemäldegalerie is known for its outstanding collection of European paintings from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. Each chapter in this book is dedicated to one painting from the collection. In the breadth of this idiosyncratic selection, painting, as it discovers itself, becomes a medium for the formulation of modern subjectivity. Each painting in focus unfolds its own making and...

Milkyways is a collection of essays by artist Camille Henrot, exploring the ambivalence of motherhood and the process of creation in both art-making and life. Each chapter delivers a cosmos of references in literature, cartoons, art history, psychoanalysis, and more—from ancient maternity myths to modern maternity wards; from Marcel Proust to Maggie Nelson to Hélène Cixous. Alongside illustrations of the...

On the Pulse of the Museum as Institution of the Future For quite some time now, ethnographic museums in Europe have been compelled to legitimate themselves. Their exhibition-making has become a topic of discussion, as has the contentious history of their collections, which have come about through colonial appropriation. Clearly, this cannot continue. That the situation can be different is...