pressPLAY

Juan Vicente Aliaga is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Valencia, where he lives and works. He is co-editor of the books Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited, 1990) and De amor y rabia. Acerca del arte y el Sida (On Love and Rage. Art and AIDS, 1993). A curator and art critic, Aliaga writes regularly for Artforum and Frieze.

Michael Archer, an art critic and lecturer. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, Untitled and Artforum, is the author of Art Since 1960 (1997) and the co-author of Installation Art (1994). He is a Tutor in art history at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Carlos Basualdo is a poet and curator based in New York who regularly contributes to Artforum and Art Nexus, among other publications. Formerly the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Basualdo was also Co-Curator of Documenta 11 (2002) and the 50th Venice Biennial (2003).

Daniel Birnbaum is a contributing editor to Artforum and the author of several books on art and philosophy, including The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl's Phenomenology (1998) and Production (2000, with the artist Carsten Hsller). From 1998 to 2000 he was the Director of IASPIS, an artists' residency programme based in Stockholm. Since January 2001 he has been the Director of Portikus and the StSdelschule Art Academy, both in Frankfurt.

Barbara Bloom is a New York-based artist whose international exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (1988), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), the International Center of Photography, New York (2006) and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2006). Her artist's books include Ghost Writer (1988), The Reign of Narcissism (1990) and The Collections of Barbara Bloom (2006).

Nicholas Bourriaud is a French critic, curator and theorist. Formerly Co-Director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, he is the author of Relational Aesthetics (1997) and the Director of Documents sur l'art, a bilingual magazine devoted to contemporary culture.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is an art historian and critic and a Professor of twentieth-century and post-war art history at Harvard University. An editor of October magazine and co-author of Art Since 1900 (2005), Buchloh has also published his collected essays in Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry (2000) and Formalism and Historicity (2004).

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Italy. In 1998 she curated the first major retrospective exhibition of William Kentridge's work, and in 1999 she edited Arte Povera, also published by Phaidon.

Lynne Cooke has been Curator at the Dia Art Foundation since 1991. She co-curated the 1991 Carnegie International and was Artistic Director of the 1996 Sydney Biennale. She is a lecturer at Yale University and is on the faculty for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Dennis Cooper, a novelist and critic, is a Contributing Editor to Artforum. He has published a number of novels, among them Frisk (1991), as well as The Dream Police: Selected Poems 1969-93.

Douglas Crimp is Professor of Art History the University of Rochester and the author of On the Museum's Ruins (1993). He has also lectured and published widely on the subject of AIDS.

Bice Curiger is Curator at Kunsthaus Zurich and the co-founder and Editor in Chief of Parkett. She wrote the definitive monograph Meret Oppenheim, A Retrospective (1989).

Diedrich Diederichsen is the critic most closely associated with

A personal encounter with 50 of the world's most significant contemporary artists, pressPLAY draws together the full texts of the complete Phaidon interviews with artists since 1995.

From highly established artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Alex Katz to midcareer masters such as Fischli and Weiss and Jenny Holzer to the most exciting artists of the current generation such as Maurizio Cattelan and Pipilotti Rist, the artists in pressPLAY work in every variety of media - from painting to video, sculpture to installation. In discussion with key art critics as well as fellow artists, novelists, musicians and theorists, together the players in pressPLAY explain in full what it means to be an artist today.

Highlights include veteran painter Vija Celmins and noted sculptor Robert Gober in an intimate discussion on their differing art practices; longtime friends and fellow travellers for decades, Benjamin Buchloh and Lawrence Weiner recall 35 years of work in the definitive, career-long interview for this key conceptual artist; the late Sir Ernst Gombrich in a discussion with the UK's pre-eminent sculptor Antony Gormley, who confesses that it was Gombrich's Story of Art that first inspired him to become an artist; the taciturn, legendary Raymond Pettibon muses on the evolution of his work with noted novelist Dennis Cooper; musician-artist Christian Marclay discusses performance, music and art with Kim Gordon from the legendary rock band Sonic Youth .