In his first collection of essays, David Levi Strauss 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 Grunewald, Jean Genet, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mizonville, Carolee Schneemann, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Daniel Joseph Martinez.