Finally Available Since 1992, Dia has presented the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art. Like the Foundation's "Discussions in Contemporary Culture" symposia series, the Lehman lectures are an example of Dia's ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary critical and intellectual discourse. The long-term, often site-specific, exhibitions at Dia offer a fertile space for discussion.
Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, together with Bettina Funcke, this second volume of collected theoretical and critical essays are by a multidisciplinary group of lecturers, and are focused on the exhibitions mounted at Dia from 1995 through 1998. Nine diverse contributors range in scope from art historian David Sylvester and philosopher Sarat Maharaj to architectural theoretician Beatriz Colomina, from philosopher Mark Taylor to fiction writer and cultural critic Marina Warner. These writers, among others, take on the challenges of illuminating, analyzing, and exploring the work of a disparate group of internationally recognized artists, including Alighiero e Boetti, Jessica Stockholder, Gerhard Richter, Juan Muñoz, Fred Sandback and Andy Warhol. Together, the essays in this book present a broad-based account of contemporary artistic practice, criticism, scholarship and theory.