The Imaginary Museum

Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal experience, professional expertise and sympathy.

In this stunningly original book, an introduction to contemporary art is combined with the author's own memories and reflections on what art means. With the help of a cast of interfering security guards, pretentious curators, sceptical visitors, angry protestors and elusive ghosts, Eastham proposes that the art of today offers a way of understanding our increasingly strange and complex times.

Eastham doesn't ask you to like the artworks in his imaginary museum, but offers the tools for you to formulate and express your own opinion of them. He argues that art should be judged by the feelings it provokes and the conversations it generates: in talking about art, we learn to talk about ourselves and the world in which we live.

In this award-winning book, Eastham, a top art critic, delves into the aesthetics and theory of contemporary art, intertwining it with social and cultural anthropology. His unique approach to criticism, which encourages readers to form their own opinions based on the feelings provoked by the art, has been short-listed for numerous prizes.

For fans of Mark Fisher (How to Write About Theatre), John Berger (A Fortunate Man), Olivia Laing (Everybody), Joan Didion (Let Me Tell You What I Mean), and Joanna Biggs (A Life of One's Own).