The last decade has seen an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and other cultural artefacts. The internet is the place where all these cultural products are stored, classified, voted, collected and trashed. What is the impact of this process on art making and on the artist? Which kind of dialogue is going on between amateur practices and codified languages? How does art respond to the society of information? This is a book about endless archives, image collections, bees plundering from flower to flower and hunters crawling through the online wilderness.

I published the essay under these various titles: “Was ist Los”, “Decor Holes”, “Akademische Graffiti”, “Depletion”, “Unique Source/All Natural Suicide Gang.” The text was written between 2003 and 2005 but updated and retitled for different contexts.

I was about to send this to press when Covid-19 abruptly pulled us into a new age. Art made before the rupture suddenly looks different, flickering with new meanings and demeanings. My book seemed to shift colors in my hands. Back in 2002, in the aftershocks of 9/11, I wrote Dispersion. That essay considered then-nascent networks as spaces for corporate exploitation and warfare, and imagined an art that might flourish in the cracks of the new system. The final sentence was, “It may be that we are standing at the beginning of something.” We certainly were at the beginning of something, ...

“One of the ways in which the Conceptual project in art has been most successful is in claiming new territory for practice. It’s a tendency that’s been almost too successful: today it seems that most of the work in the international art system positions itself as Conceptual to some degree, yielding the “Conceptual painter,” the “DJ and Conceptual artist,” or the “Conceptual web artist.” Let’s put aside the question of what makes a work Conceptual, recognizing, with some resignation, that the term can only gesture toward a thirty year-old historical moment. But it can’t be rejected entirely, as it has ...

Based on a project at Documenta 13, this publication presents new multimedia works by New York artist Seth Price (born 1973) that meditate on today’s material (fabric) culture. Folklore U.S. includes paintings on plywood, vacuum-formed rope paintings and cloth sculptures fabricated in NYC’s garment district.

For a Friend (Excerpt), 2007-2008 To accompany the audio piece “8-4, 9-5, 10-6, 11-7” (2007)

From one of the most influential artists of his generation comes a provocative, moving novella about what it means to be a creative person under today’s digital regime. In the course of a gripping, headlong narrative, Price’s unnamed protagonist moves in and out of contemporary non-spaces on a confounding and enigmatic quest, all the while meditating on art in the broadest sense: not simply painting and sculpture but also film, architecture, literature, and poetry. From boutique hotels and highway bridges to PC terminals and off-ramps; from Kanye West and Jeff Koons to George Bush and Patricia Highsmith; from the playground ...

A meal in three courses, by Martha Rosler, 1985 by Seth Price, 2004

Showing together in Europe now for the second time, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Josh Smith and Kelley Walker may not be the New Yorkiest band in the world, but if they were this would be their second album. Let’s call them fellow travelers and assume their grouping is at least partly a European construction. It’s their packaging and touring as Guyton, Price, Walker, Smith that allows for the production of something like a New York moment in the Kunsthalle and wherever such moments are in demand. And it could be that the objects and images on view here are not ...

I’m like a person who makes things. You do it one after another, unending. It goes on for such a long time: something new, and something else, and something something. Here come a lot of different varieties of strategies and arrangements, all interesting, all interlocking, mutatis mutandis. Such a lot of things!

The exhibition “In the Heart of the Country” is the first comprehensive presentation of the international collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In a relatively short time—the Museum was established in 2005—the institution has acquired over 300 works. First and foremost, these are works purchased as part of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage’s “International Collections of Contemporary Art” programme, as well as donations and temporary loans from artists, private individuals and businesses. Many of the collected works were commissioned by the Museum for its exhibitions and public projects (such as pieces by artists like Sanja Iveković, Zbigniew ...

Beginning with NDP#2, Susan Barber became the art director of North Drive Press. After initial discussions, the vinyl envelope was exchanged for a cardboard box that worked with both the loose-leaf ethos of NDP and more pragmatic concerns such as shelving and space to include more content, especially the myriad multiples created specifically for the project.