In these fierce and lyrical essays, David Levi Strauss calls for an art—and implicitly for an approach to art writing—that is passionately experiential, intellectually grounded, and politically fearless. He addresses the always conflicted relation between aesthetics and politics by concentrating on specific instances—from allopathic art to Desert Storm propaganda, from Columbus’s legacy to Robert Smithson’s prophesies, and from new art in post-Soviet Russia to public art in the United States—and by focusing on the work of artists as various as Grünewald, Jean Genet, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Carolee Schneemann, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Daniel Joseph Martinez.