This anthology on art and politics brings together several essays by Ian McKay that span more than twenty years of his writing on the visual arts and culture industries. Topics covered range from political portraiture to curatorial ethics, environmental politics to the influence of Austrian corporations in the Balkans, as well as the aesthetics of totalitarianism and a section on the emergence of a new European art scene, drawing upon his writings from the 1990s about Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The essays collected here first appeared in Art Monthly, State and The Antique Collector. The book also includes the author's long essay 'On the Death of Czech Culture', which is extracted from the book, 'New Art from Eastern Europe: Identity and Conflict' (published by Academy in 1994 but, for some time, out of print).