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 Lenin's mausoleum have to do with the readymade?
Like an anthropologist tourguide from a distant planet, Boris Groys answers these questions (and more) with calm detachment-guiding 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 Groys's writings are formative, unpredictable, and always prophetic in their grasp of art's political metabolism. Few thinkers have written so lucidly about the avant-garde's utopian exhaustion, the museum's revolutionary promise, or the artist's 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 art's intellectual life.

Anton Vidokle, artist, curator, and founder of E-Flux Journal