Published: February 2009

Publisher: London and New York

Salon to Biennial grew out of Altshuler’s 1994 book The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century. An important study of the making of certain influential exhibitions, that book had one major flaw: a limited number of color plates and tiny reproductions of sprawling exhibitions.

Published: November 1999

Publisher: MIT Press

Did Conceptual artists usher art into the realm of language (or language into the realm of art) or, on the contrary, did the fact that art had already become linguistic allow certain artists to invent a practice that could be called Conceptual art?

Published: February 2009

Publisher: Prestel

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids—taken 1970-75, when the artist was 23 to 29 years old—document his emerging identity, both artistic and sexual. The book Polaroids: Mapplethorpe, published to accompany an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, reveals a photographer determined to bring formal rigor to the medium’s intimacy.

Publisher: Princeton University Press

James Cuno’s passionate, finely reasoned new book, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage, is a fresh salvo in the ongoing battle between museums that collect antiquities and modern states that claim to be the legal heirs of ancient societies and cultures.

Publisher: MIT Press

Seemingly all that new media art lacked was validation by the academy. Now three related books from MIT Press and the announcement by Danube University in Krems, Austria, of the November 2008 start-up of the first degree-granting Masters of Media Art Histories program (featuring user-friendly rolling admission and low residency requirements) suggest that perhaps this development is already under way.