"Is painting a mode of thought? Is there a philosophy of painting that extends beyond the confines of the medium? Where does the edge of the canvas end and the edge of the world begin? Painting at the Edge of the World brings together thirty artists and some of the most provocative critical thinkers today, each of whom poses a new set of questions about the irrepressible power and relevance of contemporary painting."

"No longer solely bound by such traditional categories as figuration, abstraction, portraiture, and landscape, or even by the conventional definition of the medium as paint on canvas, many artists today demonstrate that a philosophy of painting is to be found not only in these genres, but also in photographic, conceptual, performative, popular culture, and architectural manifestations.

This collection of essays provides a wide-ranging reconsideration of the status of painting in the current global situation: its Lazarus-like persistence in the face of its perpetual "deaths"; the dispersion of an art-historical center and the assertion of cultural difference; the relationship between painting and its "support"; the crisis of legitimacy it shares with rock music; the practice of painting as simulation drive; the suture between an "original" avant-garde and its deferred repetition; the trauma of speech. What becomes clear is that painting's traditional function as a window on the world has been circumvented, or rather that someone has left the window open and a number of things have crawled in.

As Yve-Alain Bois so eloquently paraphrases Robert Musil: "If some painting is still to come, if painters are still to come, they will not come from where we expect them to." Painting at the Edge of the World looks beyond our expectations and provides a broad context for understanding painterly practice today."--Jacket.