Publication of texts from talks conducted at the Museum of Modern Art with Barbara Kruger, "Picturing Greatness"; Vito Acconci, "The Viewer as Victim"; Mark Tansey, "The Strange Benevolence of Clement Greenberg"; Faith Ringgold, "Slaves of the Modern"; Komar & Melamid, "Malevich's Dream"; Elizabeth Murray on Céanne: "Merging Thought and Emotion"; Joseph Kosuth on Duchamp: "Please Do Not Touch the Sculpture"; Jane Dickson on Claude Monet: "A Battlefield of Lilies"; James Wines on Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye: "Building as Polemic"; David Salle, "A Clyfford Still Quiz"; Scott Burton, "The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden as a Work of Semipublic Art"; Alice Aycock on Constructivism: "A Schema on Her Back"; Jenny Holzer on Meret Oppenheim's "Object: A Cup of Words"; Ashley Bickerton on Donald Judd: "Monoculture and Polyculture"; Francesc Torres on George Grosz: "Clarity that Hurt"; and Houston Conwill on "The Cakewalk Humanifesto: A Dance of Remembrance." Edited by Christopher Lyon, with introduction by Riva Castleman.
"The first Contemporary Art in Context series began with a panel discussion on February 29, 1988, led by Ingrid Sischy, former editor of Artforum. She started the cataloguing the disparate characterizations that have been made of the eighties: "a completely corrupt time, a chaotic time, a liberating time, an open time, a confusing time, an unoriginal time, a fashionable time, an imaginative time." Rather than work with on theme or concept of the decade, she brought together people with different ideas and approaches." -- from publication's text by Lyon.