This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm joined by the writer Chris Krauss, who will be best known probably to most

spectator readers as the author of I Love Dick.

And yet before she was celebrated as a novelist, she's been a performance artist, she's

been a videographer, she's been a critic and an essayist, and she's done, she's been a go-go dancer

as well at various times. So Chris's new book is called

social practices and it collects a number of the essays she's written over the years about and

towards the, well, LA art scene, I suppose, in particular, but there's, I mean, how would you

characterize the contents of the book, Chris? Well, I guess there's two bodies of material.

One are kind of zeitgeisty pieces in a way.

I work in the art world a lot.

So I'm often asked to write catalog essays and things for artists.

That's kind of my work exists as much in the art world as it does

in the literary world. So in the course of this kind of coming and going within the art world,

I've witnessed a lot of projects in the last decade or so that have taken place outside the main

centers and that don't involve material objects per se,

that, you know, are more about creating events. And I've written about some of those,

like Rolling Jubilee, one of the essays lost properties. There's a lot about the group Rolling Jubilee

that did a project where they bought debt on the open market

and forgave it.

Also, I did a project in Mexicali with a group of artists, an alternative gallery called Mexicali

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