To the Wall Street Journal, it's "Europe's most prestigious twentieth-century art fair;" to the New York Times, the "Olympics of the Art World." Either way it's one of the most glamorous and important international art fairs going. This comprehensive catalogue fits 275 top galleries between two covers--550 illustrations, 700-plus pages--for reference until the next year.

The Art Basel is more than just a fair in the commercial sense of the word, more than a temporally and spatially concentrated gathering of dealers offering their goods for sale to interested buyers. It is at the same time the site of a display of "holy" goods in the presence of thousands and thousands of believers, a pilgrim's goal for the ritualized adoration of modern and contemporary art. It is also, and for precisely this reason, the decisive witness of the upheaval marking a radical change in that relationship between "art" and "money" - with all the consequences, not least for the evaluation of what is to be regarded as genuine art. The present study, the result of several years of sociological field work, attempts to draw a picture of this change as perceived by the participants, the organizers of the fair, the gallerists, collectors, curators, art consultants and artists, as a central problem of the contemporary art scene. The authors, members of a research group of the University of St. Gallen, present in When Art meets Money a detailed study of the practice of the contemporary picture market, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's influential sociology of art.

Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the century--world wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust--grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning? The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon efforts to abide in disaster's infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of writing: to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation. Maurice Blanchot has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that Blanchot's writing is a "language of pure transcendence, without correlative." Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman remarked that Blanchot's influence on contemporary writers "cannot be overestimated."

The world′s cultures and their forms of creation, presentation and preservation are deeply affected by globalization in ways that are inadequately documented and understood. The Cultures and Globalization series is designed to fill this void in our knowledge. In this series, leading experts and emerging scholars track cultural trends connected to globalization throughout the world, resulting in a powerful analytic tool-kit that encompasses the transnational flows and scapes of contemporary cultures. Each volume presents data on cultural phenomena through colourful, innovative information graphics to give a quantitative portrait of the cultural dimensions and contours of globalization. This second volume The Cultural Economy analyses the dynamic relationship in which culture is part of the process of economic change that in turn changes the conditions of culture. It brings together perspectives from different disciplines to examine such critical issues as: • the production of cultural goods and services and the patterns of economic globalization • the relationship between the commodification of the cultural economy and the aesthetic realm • current and emerging organizational forms for the investment, production, distribution and consumption of cultural goods and services • the complex relations between creators, producers, distributors and consumers of culture • the policy implications of a globalizing cultural economy By demonstrating empirically how the cultural industries interact with globalization, this volume will provide students of contemporary culture with a unique, indispensable reference tool.

A full examination of global legal rules governing liability for environmental harm in areas beyond the national jurisdiction of states.