Anthologize this!

A Turkish translation of my essay Secret Publicity (from the collection of essays bearing the same title) was recently published in the book Kamusal Alan ve Güncel Sanat/The Public Turn in Contemporary Art, edited by Pelin Tan and Sezgin Boynik. On a similar note, a somewhat abridged version of my text Appropriation Mythology, a.k.a. The Feathers of the Eagle, will feature in Appropriation (editor: David Evans), an anthology from the series Documents of Contemporary Art, published by Whitechapel Art Gallery and MIT Press, and expected in April 2009. Later still, my essay Progressive Striptease is set to be included in the anthology Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (and published by Blackwell).

To my mind, it is regrettable that the format of the Documents of Contemporary Art series, which does a laudable job in bringing good selections of relevant texts to a comparatively wide student audience, necessitates cuts in the anthologized texts. There are no doubt pressing economical reasons for this, but students are already given extracts and summaries far too often; there nothing like a confrontation with uncensored texts, complete and replete with their illuminating dead ends, contraditions, and obtuse moments. That being said, we were able to arrive at a reasonably good edit of Appropriation Mythology, and the list of contributors looks inspired and inspiring. I assume that the Perform anthology will be more costly and aimed at a somewhat smaller and more specialized audience. However, this means that the texts can be published integrally. To quote a famous Dutch dialectical thinker: elk nadeel heb z'n voordeel.

Appropriation is now available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262550709/ref=s9_simz_gw_s1_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0FWN3NT47K9C254HRPGM&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846