Synopses & Reviews
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.
Review
"Idiosyncratic, scattered and compelling, Kraus's take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard." Publishers Weekly (online) Semiotext(e)
Review
"Kraus predictably... plunges into [Los Angeles's] 'not-thereness' headfirst and takes the reader with her down every rabbit hole." Masha Gutkin San Francisco Bay Guardian Semiotext(e)
Review
"Kraus predictably ... plunges into [Los Angeles's] 'not-thereness' headfirst and takes the reader with her down every rabbit hole."
— Masha Gutkin, San Francisco Bay Guardian"Idiosyncratic, scattered and compelling, Kraus's take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard."
— Publishers Weekly (online)"Like all the great chroniclers of Los Angeles, Chris Kraus observes the city's emptiness, possibility and hallucination of meaning. But Kraus is Joan Didion cubed, writing herself into the narrative of the city."
— Tamar Brott, Los Angeles Magazine
Review
"Like all the great chroniclers of Los Angeles, Chris Kraus observes the city's emptiness, possibility and hallucination of meaning. But Kraus is Joan Didion cubed, writing herself into the narrative of the city." Tamar Brott Los Angeles Magazine Semiotext(e)
Synopsis
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs.
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.
Synopsis
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs.
About the Author
Chris Kraus is the author of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and the novels Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Torpor. The 2007 recipient of the Frank Mather Award in Art Criticism and a 2010 Warhol Foundation Arts Writer's grant, she has taught art writing in graduate programs at University of California, Irvine, Art Center College, San Francisco Art Institute, and European Graduate School.