This book brings together a spectrum of critical and creative responses by writers and artists to the formative and transformative drifts of contemporary culture and the determining cultural and political conditions of modernity. The topics range from the ethics of difference to the aesthetics of distance; from the representation of dreams to the iconography of AIDS; and includes challenging reevaluations of the art of Nazi Germany, the writing of Walter Benjamin and the politics of transnational visual culture in South Africa. The diversity of argument and the randomness of subject, both accidental and inevitable, provide a framework accessible to all readers but offer a particularly valuable insight into the pedagogy of the postmodern student of art. (Publisher Book Description)