Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness

Author(s): Chris Kraus

Society & Culture | Creativity

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicentre of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city?
Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.


Product Information

"Semiotext(e) has for a generation been the leading edge of the most incendiary and exciting intellectual revolution in the West." - Rick Moody; "Semiotext(e) invented a new plateau of thought which is dizzyingly complex and deeply subjective...at once responsible to the past and bravely forward looking." - Avital Ronell; "It is a nondescript day, all emptiness and breathless heat, and I'm driving through Fontana, east along the 10. There are a lot of billboards, Smelly Credit? Pssst, I'm at Flesh. The Spearmint Rhino ad girl gazes straight ahead, all ivory and pink and I'm wondering how her face achieves its state of pornographic blankness. Unlike the blankness of contemporary art, which references the futility of gesture, her vacancy is a verb and the viewer its direct object. Her face says, Come all over me." - from Video Green; "More anthropologist than art historian, Chris Kraus skewers the received ideas of LA neoconceptualism: beauty, ambiguity, and the yawning vacancy of the technological sublime." - Charlie Finch, Artnet"

Chris Kraus is the author of the novels Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Summer of Hate as well as Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and Where Art Belongs, all published by Semiotext(e). A Professor of Writing at the European Graduate School, she writes for various magazines and lives in Los Angeles.

General Fields

  • : 9781584350224
  • : MIT Press
  • : MIT Press
  • : September 2004
  • : United States
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Chris Kraus
  • : Paperback
  • : 0404
  • : 701.03097949409051
  • : 224
  • : Illustrations