Literary Nonfiction. Art. WHAT IS ART? is a hilarious scripto-visual Dadaist-Derridean quest to solve the impossible question, 'What is Art?' Using, ironically, anti-art strategies--appropriation, violation, bad puns, found objects, offensive imagery, collage, and re-cycled past works culled from his own repertoire--Norman conquers the detritus of the high and the low in his own special recipe for bricolage. Using his book as a literal potboiler, he chops up and dumps in his ingredients to produce his own unique stew as he simmers over the nature of creative intervention in our wacky (both cruel and comic) world.--James Hugunin

Author Biography

Norman Conquest is a verbo-visual prankster based in the Bay Area. In 1989, he founded the anti-censorship art collective, Beuyscouts of Amerika. He is the author of many books, including Sartre's French Phrase Book; Interiors: A Book of Very Clean Rooms; A Beginner's Guide to Art Deconstruction; By Any Means: An Avant-Pop Anthology; The Selected Poems of Edward D. Wood, Jr.; The Little Cock That Could; Eight Adult Males & Other Odd Tales; Burn This Book; It's Fun to Be Rich in America (with Michael Leigh); The Neglected Works of Norman Conquest; Snowdrop in Africa.