Swiss mixed-media artist Sylvie Fleury (born 1961) has long been interested in depicting the juncture of materialism and materiality in contemporary consumer culture. Her 1998 installation Bedroom Ensemble II draws directly from soft sculpture artist Claes Oldenberg, who also created bedroom installations under the same title; through inconsistent scale and unusual textures, Oldenberg’s bedroom suggests a disconnect from reality that becomes more apparent the longer one studies the piece. Fleury’s piece amplifies and subverts such ideas with her own vocabulary of textures and colors. While Oldenberg’s bedroom is a particularly cold example of 1960s interior design, Fleury’s piece bursts with . . . .go to book page >>

Not quite a real” museum and not quite an installation piece of its own, the Museum of Modern Art Syros (MOMAS) was created in 1993 by German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953–97) as a private artists’ space that poked fun at the institutional value of museums. Kippenberger claimed the cement ruins of an abandoned building on the Greek island of Syros as the perfect site for his museum—the fact that there were no walls on which to hang any art did not matter to him, because no art was ever actually displayed. For seven years, Kippenberger assumed the role of museum . . . .go to book page >>

French artist Philippe Thomas (1951–95) never intended to make a name for himself; rather, he was much more invested in the artist’s ability to disappear behind his work. In 1987 he created readymades belong to everyone®, a communication and events agency that mainly provided posters and signboards for different advertising campaigns. Though he was the sole creator of these artifacts, Thomas declined to sign his name on any of them so that the provenance of such pieces took priority over their initial origin—the collector or institution who commissioned or purchased the works would sign their names instead. The entrepreneurial project . . . .go to book page >>