Secret Publicity

These thought-provoking essays from the first laureate of the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture’s Prize for Art Criticism consider the central role of publicity as both a subject of and a power in contemporary art, and ask whether artists could create a publicity opposed to the mass media. How open are such alternatives? Would art that attempts to develop its own counter-publicity become a secret society? Lutticken, who teaches at the University of Amsterdam and stokes the media machine himself by writing regularly for Artforum, the New Left Review and Afterimage, considers the work of artists including Stan Douglas, Andrea Fraser, Tino Sehgal, Jeff Wall, Marcel Broodthaers, Andy Warhol, Georges Bataille and Guy Debord. To mark the publication of this, his first book, debates are being organized in Amsterdam, Brussels, London and New York.