Includes bibliographical references and index.

A Kind of Context -- Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder -- Indexes and Other Figures -- The Conditions of Problems -- On 'A Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock' -- 'Seeing' and 'Describing': the Artists' Studio -- On the Surface of Painting -- Reading the Museum -- Index: Incident in a Museum VIII -- Index: Incident in a Museum XVI -- Index: Incident in a Museum XXV -- Unit Cure, Unit Ground -- On Pictures and Paintings -- 'Hostages' 1: Painting as Cure -- 'Hostages' 2: Some Other Sense -- Modernism in two voices -- A culture of art -- Critical resources -- Epilogue: Modernism and the Postmodern -- A corrective note -- Abstraction and Abstractionism -- Minimalism and the post-Minimal -- Conceptual Art and Art & Language -- Postscript -- The index as art-work -- A logical implosion -- Background -- Foreground -- Readings and readers -- A monstrous detente -- Black propaganda -- An essay, a conjecture and an exhibition -- The orders of discourse -- The studio genre -- Painting and expression -- Some functions of allegory -- The transformation of the index -- Surface -- Contingency -- Change -- Erasure -- 'Incidents in a Museum' -- A work in process -- The moment of criticism -- Potential and loss