Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art

A collection of critical essays by the artist and writer John Kelsey, published by Sternberg Press in 2010 in its Institut für Kunstkritik series.

The book gathers Kelsey's writing from the preceding decade, much of it first printed in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett and artists' catalogues. It is edited by Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, who describe texts that are playful and true to the situations they observe. The essays work from inside the commercial art world and ask how criticism can drop its traditional distance from its subject.

Kelsey is an American artist and writer, a member of the collective Bernadette Corporation since 1999 and, with Emily Sundblad, a co-founder in 2004 of the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art. The book is a selection of that work.