By combining and colliding the unexpected, the US artist John Baldessari (1931-2020), created conceptual works that raise questions regarding what art is, how art is made, and what art can look like. After concluding in the 1960s that a photographic image or a text were more adequate expressions of his artistic intentions than painting, John Baldessari's practice took a new direction. Since then, Baldessari has combined subjects from the imagery of popular culture with linguistic examinations, creating works that challenge artistic norms and boundaries. Besides the two essays the book also includes a wide selection of Baldessari's own writings from 1968-2011.

Country House, a ''comedy with corpses,'' is a wicked subversion of all those realistic psychological dramas of jealousy, adultery, murder and suicide that ask to be taken seriously. Witkacy's send-up assumes the form of a ghost story full of surprises, in the course of which an entire family of four is gleefully dispatched to the other world. When it was first performed in 1923 in Torun, Country House was judged unsuitable for the general public because it derided moral, social and dramatic convention. Three years later, as directed by the playwright himself in Lwów, the drama proved an unexpected success with audiences (although it only ran for four nights) and ever since has been among Witkacy's most frequently performed works. Today we can appreciate Country House not only as a systematic demolition of stage realism, but also as an anxious probing of the elusive boundaries between life and death, exposing the ''dark places'' of the human psyche that make us laugh nervously.

Contemporary environmental Philosophy has overwhelmingly continued certain materialist assumptions toward nature. In its pursuit to better use nature’s material offering for future generations, there remains little discussion about these materialist assumptions, much less their contribution to the current crisis. In fact, outside the Modern West, the vast majority of societies saw nature as bringing more than just material, that it brought something more than meets the eye. Thus our conceptions of what is actually seen impacts our response to it,and before even thinking about that response. Along these lines, our conceptions of beauty play a large role in how we approach and determine nature’s value. Such aesthetic assumptions directly impact our desires with regard to nature, whether or not we see it as a place of sacred dwelling or merely for surface pleasure and use. And again, aside from the Modern West, nature has been seen as the former, naturally causing a sort of reverence which in turns alters our interactions with the natural world, as well as with non-human animals and other human beings. The ability, then, to see nature as a primary relationship, tied to our aesthetic conceptions and presuppositions, rather than only a place of use for our own continued biological existence, has the potential to impact communal desire with regard to the environment, and it is only such a change in communal desire that will make an effective and lasting impact on the current crisis.