The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manuf[...]

Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion[...]

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of "unofficial" artists in Moscow -- artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences -- created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow[...]

"On the New" looks at the economies of exchange and valuation that drive modern culture's key sites: the intellectual marketplace and the archive. As ideas move from one context to another, newness is created. This continuous shifting of the line that separates the valuable from the worthless, cultu[...]

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernist[...]

The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot[...]

If all things in the world can be considered sources of aesthetic experience, suggests media critic and philosopher Boris Groys, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessari[...]

In den Darstellenden Künsten steigt der Marktwert des Realen unaufhaltsam. ?Reality?-Show-Formate werden für die Bühne adaptiert und die Beuys-Formel ?Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler? wandelt die Bühne in ein ?Jedermann ist ein Schauspieler? ab. In der aktuellen Inszenierungspraxis der [...]