978-90-76936-27-7

Stout/Kramer

128

12.4 x 18.6 cm

Hardcover

Date of release: September 2010

Text: Edzard Mik / Photography: Jim Gourley
Editing: Lex ter Braak, Mirjam Beerman / Translation: Jonathan Reeder

A publication by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture

English edition

Architects, contrary to most artists, work by definition from the core of society. Rem Koolhaas is one of the few architects who demonstrates the ability to do so while maintaining a critical distance. Does his strategy contain a hint for artists on how to create significant art in a world where everything seems bound for insignificance?

Writer Edzard Mik visited the CCTV building in Beijing, designed by Rem Koolhaas's OMA, and wrote a lyrical 'road essay' about Koolhaas, Beijing and on being an artist in the twenty-first century.

'Image overload, significance deficit, suspension of identity and nonstop transformation and adaptation: it is not only the condition of travel but also the condition into which modernity has delivered us.'

Edzard Mik (1960) is a Dutch novelist and a regularly featured essayist on visual art, architecture and theater in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and weekly magazine Vrij Nederland.

This is the fifth publication in a series of essays commissioned by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.
 

The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, known in the Netherlands as Fonds BKVB, is the national body responsible for enabling visual artists, designers, architects and cultural mediators to develop their work in a variety of ways. To achieve this goal, the Fonds BKVB follows a three-track policy: subsidies, internationalisation and special projects.

The core activity of the Fonds BKVB is to provide subsidies to individual visual artists, designers, architects and cultural mediators. In addition to subsidies for beginning artists and financial assistance for applicants at the basic level to help them continue their work, the Fonds BKVB also provides grants for projects, research, new work, continuing education abroad, travel, publications, etc. The aim of the various grants is to stimulate contemporary visual art, design and/or architecture in the Netherlands. For more information: