Elmgreen & Dragset: Celebrity - The One and the Many

In their latest monograph, the Danish-Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset address the world of celebrity: rumor-mongering, life in the public eye, the mechanisms of the media, its formation of myths and how those myths endlessly bombard us with staged presentations of the self. Two allegorical installations on celebrity and its implications of the one (the celebrity) and the many (the rest of us) were devised for the duo’s exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, and are here documented across 100 color plates. In one of the museum’s atriums, Elmgreen & Dragset installed a full-scale high-rise apartment block; the other atrium was converted into a neoclassical ballroom. Also documented in this volume are The Welfare Show and the widely acclaimed 2009 Venice Biennale project, The Collectors. The book includes interviews with the duo and with French philosopher Paul Virilio.