Jack Goldstein

A leading protagonist of the “Pictures Generation,” Jack Goldstein (1945–2003) has long been prized by his colleagues and a specialist audience around the world for his heroic independence of spirit, but his actual work has typically remained inaccessible and unidentifiable to the wider public until now. His oeuvre is in fact characterized by its diversity, encompassing as it does performances, films, albums, paintings, aphorisms, the critique of text and image production by direct appropriation, in the vein of his colleagues Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. “Media is sensational” was a famous aphorism of Goldstein's—meaning that “technology does everything for us so that we no longer have to function in terms of experience. We function in terms of aesthetics.” This first thorough catalogue on Goldstein at last does justice to his work and its influence. It contains a wide selection of illustrations, an interview with Goldstein from 1985 by Chris Dercon and essays by Klaus Görner, Chrissie Iles and Shepherd Steiner.