In John Baldessari's new book, Yours in Food, the founding member of the conceptual art movement explores America at the table, savoring the nuances of breaking bread in carefully composed vignettes culled appropriated video and film. Reflections on food and eating specially commissioned from a smorgasbord of contemporary writers on culture and the arts, from novelist David Eggers to musician David Byrne, offer up the perfect accompaniment to Baldessari's work. Paired with his images, these humorous, insightful, and, in some cases, bizarre meditations investigate one of the most fundamental and telling of all human experiences. A visual and intellectual feast, Yours in Food is sure to entertain and delight readers of fiction, art history, and cultural criticism and all lovers of food. A Blind Spot Book published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Burning his early paintings and producing his 1970 "Cremation Project," John Baldessari embarked on a new quest to explore the relationships between painting and language, images and text, originality and authorship. This overview of his works up to the early 1980s, encompassing film, photography, and painting, show him rooting around with characteristic humor and poignancy.

By combining and colliding the unexpected, the US artist John Baldessari (1931-2020), created conceptual works that raise questions regarding what art is, how art is made, and what art can look like. After concluding in the 1960s that a photographic image or a text were more adequate expressions of his artistic intentions than painting, John Baldessari's practice took a new direction. Since then, Baldessari has combined subjects from the imagery of popular culture with linguistic examinations, creating works that challenge artistic norms and boundaries. Besides the two essays the book also includes a wide selection of Baldessari's own writings from 1968-2011.

For over three decades now, David Byrne has been a leading light in American culture - in popular music, experimental theatre, film, television, fine art, and writing. Based on the cultural capital he gained with his groundbreaking band Talking Heads, Byrne is able to enter into collaborations with many artists, some of popular fame -Brian Eno and Jonathan Demme, for example - and others known best in more specialized circles - such as Joseph Kosuth, Twyla Tharp, and Caetano Veloso. The map of Byrne's collaborations, including the casual and incidental ones, reveals an ongoing effort to combine avant-gardism with popular appeal. This highly original and illustrated account of David Byrne's career is structured by choosing a specific abstract approach, or a combination of two approaches, for each chapter, discussing the parallels and contradictions between such approaches to benefit the interpretation of Byrne's art. As a result, the fertile conceptual brew that characterizes Byrne's way of making art is present from the beginning, while each chapter adds to thorough insight and developing perspective.