A combination exhibition catalogue and provocative theoretical text, this book features two opposing essays that disagree about the supposed purpose or operation of contemporary painting.

The two-part Auckland show features the work of 25 painters from New Zealand, Europe, and the United States—Gerhard Richter and Paul McCarthy among them—offering a wide variety of practices.

Essays by curators Jan Bryant and Leonhard Emmerling pay particular attention to the legacies of conceptualism. Emmerling's text takes off from Kant and Adorno to consider painting's complete uselessness as the basis of its inalienability; Bryant adapts Jean Paulhan's ideas on cliché and terror to account for aspects of contemporary painting practice that cannot be folded neatly into dominant art-historical discourses.