VIDEO GREEN: LOS ANGELES ART AND THE TRIUMPH OF NOTHINGNESS
By Chris Kraus
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 epicenter 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.
“Idiosyncratic, scattered and compelling, Kraus's take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Kraus predictably... plunges into [Los Angeles's] 'not-thereness' headfirst and takes the reader with her down every rabbit hole.”
—Masha Gutkin, San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Like all the great chroniclers of Los Angeles, Chris Kraus observes the city's emptiness, possibility and hallucination of meaning. But Kraus is Joan Didion cubed, writing herself into the narrative of the city.”
—Tamar Brott, Los Angeles Magazine
Paperback, 224 pp.
Published August 27, 2004