Pop Touched Me: The Art of Rob Pruitt

The first full survey of Rob Pruitt, an artist who built a career out of testing how much bad taste, sincerity and self-sabotage the art world could absorb.

Two hundred and twenty-four pages and some 250 colour plates track twenty years: the fast rise and faster fall of Pruitt & Early in the early 1990s, the exile that followed, and the return through work that refused to stay conceptual - the Cocaine Buffet, 101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself, the flea-market pieces, the glitter pandas, and the excursions into painting, drawing, sculpture, textile and industrial design. Jeffrey Deitch, Bob Nickas, Glenn O'Brien, Domenick Ammirati and Jennifer Bornstein contribute essays, and short statements from artists, dealers and friends including Jeff Koons, Marc Jacobs and John Waters fill out the picture. Abrams published it in 2010, edited by Eva Prinz, who according to Pruitt commissioned the book after meeting him on the street while he was casting cement into blue jeans.

Rob Pruitt (b. 1964, Washington, DC) works in New York and remains best known outside the gallery world for the Rob Pruitt Art Awards, the annual prize-giving he staged as both tribute to and parody of the art establishment.