Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith s thousand-page homage to New York City
Here is akaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, "Capital"is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis.
It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, "The Arcades Project," from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as Sex, Central Park, Commodity, Loneliness, Gentrification, Advertising, and Mapplethorpe.
"Capital"is a book designed to fascinate and to fail for can a megalopolis truly ever be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project."