Essay

The role of jazz as a catalyst in rock, pop, funk, new wave, hip-hop, and techno.

A series of propositions and encounters in service to an aesthetic, critical, and poetic experience of living life led by death.

On the advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and nonhuman entities.

How the transition to fossil fuels entailed an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization.

A wide-ranging discursive study of the cultural geography of the Central European avant-garde between the wars.

The first documentary account by artist, curator and publisher Ludovic Burel, Le laboratoire de fermentation (The fermentation laboratory) retraces four years of investigation, carried out on several continents, into wild and cultivated plants and the means of fermenting them, questioning our relationship to both the human (individual and society) and the non-human (plant and other).

A philosopher's journey into the heart of New York artistic life.

Refusing the digital world of late capitalism.

A new field of counter-investigation across journalism, human rights, art and law.

A very personal essay that provides a clear introduction to Gilles Deleuze's thinking through his relationship with cinema, seen as a field of experimentation (existential, conceptual and aesthetic) to resist death, disaster and the stupefaction produced by the “modern fact”.

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of "planetarity" to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

Eyal and Ines Weizman explore the history of the before-and-after image, from its origins in 19th-century Paris to today's satellite surveillance.

In this essay, Thierry de Duve leaves the aesthetics and history of the art to approach, under the religious prism, two anthropological questions that the mutation of the symbolic order in progress makes pressing: the difference of the sexes and the future of the politics of emancipation.

The Heideggerien deconstruction of metaphysics by Reiner Schürmann.

The Place of the Symbolic brings together Reiner Schürmann's essays on the nexus between art and politics.

The social, historical and cultural dimensions of the skin in Brazilian art and literature.

A new collection of writings by the composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt, considering among other topics the rich points of contact between minimalist musical aesthetics and intuitionistic mathematics.

An essay on historical thinking through an examination of the unstudied minor genre of the newspaper weather map.

A reflection on our present, through a series of portraits of contemporary artists.

Marion Laval-Jeantet's research into therapeutic care continues her work with Benoît Mangin under the name of Object-Oriented Art on microbiota, at the crossroads of scientific art, biology, anthropology, psychology and ethology.

This history of art collecting traces a multiplicity of aesthetic attitudes through the prism of certain key figures in the history of taste. Over the course of the chapters, we discover how art collecting reflects—or responds to—an individual's character.

A wide-ranging study of the visual and theoretical practice of Anni Albers, a pivotal figure between two continents and two modernities, as part of a general history of art, design and textile production in the European and American women's avant-gardes.

A philosophical reflection on the place of sound, from musical aesthetics to sound habitat, at the crossroads of sound, music and technology studies, and phenomenology.

An exploration of the ecologies of music and sound, from an ecosophical and emancipatory perspective.

On the relationship between architecture and design.

If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse? In 1981, Richard Sennett delivered six lectures about this relationship, and issued a call to action that remains relevant today.

An essay-length book arguing for the autonomy of art in the present.

A theory of passive vitalism.

Jean-Christophe Thomas analyzes François Bayle's complete work in 52 recurring features (book augmented with 151 sound examples to download).

This book brings together Bernhard Rüdiger's theoretical texts on the questions of language and form in contemporary art, seen from the perspective of the possibility of thinking them within the paradigm of shock or awe.

A history of stupidity (deliberate and sometimes even claimed), regression and superficiality in the arts.

The notion of primitivism rethought to highlight the role of the African referent in the development of the artistic and literary avant-garde in Europe.

Parker and Pollock's seminal volume of feminist art history.

The first attempt to map that ensemble of subcultures, popular narratives, and visual and auditory languages we now recognize as "internet aesthetics".

A stunning look at Stravinski's The Rite of Spring, recreated by choreographer Dominique Brun with thirty dancers in 2013.

Art, empathy and political solidarity.

The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art, written in 1971, reevaluates the legacies of painting inherited by the artist Nilima Sheikh.

Indian artist Kiran Subbaiah reevaluates the history of Modernism, through its ideals of growth and progress, as one steeped in contradictions around industrialisation and its effects on society.

How does the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.

An interdisciplinary investigation by French-Bulgarian visual artist Iglika Christova, an explorer of the microcosm, into the relationship between the mechanisms of the living world and drawing.

The story/manifesto of an architect's life: a re-reading of Gilles Perraudin's career by himself, enabling us to retrace the path of a thought in perpetual motion.

In the first monograph on the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine, political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari explores the artist's theoretical and political innovations to illuminate a more haptic, embodied approach to the practice of critical theory.