Art Metropole

#12436

Capital

Artist

Kenneth Goldsmith

Date

2015

Publisher

Verso

Format

Artists' Books

Length

928 pages

Genre

Poetry, Essays

Description

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis.

It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Commodity,” “Downtown,” “Subway,” and “Mapplethorpe.”

Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail — for can a megalopolis truly be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage.

Hardcover, boxed edition.

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