Why is the internet like the spirit of Napoleon? What do Facebook posts share with Christian icons? Why have we swerved so quickly from neoliberalism to neofascism? And what does Lenins mausoleum have to do with the readymade?
Like an anthropologist tourguide from a distant planet, Boris Groys answers these questions (and more) with calm detachmentguiding us through cultures of the museum, art history, the internet, and Russia. His counterintuitive connections brilliantly puncture received wisdom, and disrupt canonical truisms with dark and delightful irony. This is cultural critique as pure creativity and philosophical imagination. Reading Groys is a mindblowing trip. * Claire Bishop, artist, critic, Presidential Professor of Art History and Faculty Director of the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center * Boris Groyss writings are formative, unpredictable, and always prophetic in their grasp of arts political metabolism. Few thinkers have written so lucidly about the avant-gardes utopian exhaustion, the museums revolutionary promise, or the artists peculiar labor of self-design. Reading Groys has shaped how many of us think and work. This collection captures the full arc of that influence: theoretical, ironic, and strangely intimate. It is both a record and a renewal of the conversation that continues to define contemporary arts intellectual life. * Anton Vidokle, artist, curator, and founder of E-Flux Journal * This collection of essays, written between 1995 and 2023, gives us a deeper, wider, and longer access to Boris Groys unique modes of thought than any other to date. Most are unpublished or not previously translated into English. His great themes are all present: the Russian soul, class struggle, avant-garde art, museums, revolution, curatorship, becoming an artwork, and, through it all, anti-philosophy. Edited by Marcus Hurwitz, their convolution here is astonishingly fresh. His introduction is the best yet written. It is alone worth the price of admission. * Terry Smith, Slade Professor of Fine Arts, University of Cambridge, 2025-26, author of Art to come: Histories of Contemporary Art (2019) and Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images (2022). *
