Shift Work: A Conversation on Art and Life in the Third Millennium

FORTHCOMING Fall 2025

Art makes diverse ways of being within and seeing the world emerge. Looking at, thinking about, and living alongside art is both a gesture of avoidance—of capital’s goals to normalize, control, and structure life—and a gesture of hope: encountering other models for living while lost inside the work. Shift Work is a book of experimental[…]

Selected Essays, 2019–2023

FORTHCOMING Summer 2025

There are floods that destroy entire contents of a library or publishing house; libraries and museums bombed during wartime; authors themselves demanding certain works or letters be burned at their death; those who attempt at their own risk to save what they can of a manuscript; manuscripts left in taxis and never to be found[…]

Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies: Treasures from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Daryl S. Paulson Collection

Published: 12/31/2022

The philosophical ties between Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies as represented in a selection of fine art — including Daoist nature deities and immortals, Confucian scholar brushes and inkstones, and Buddhist guardian kings and compassionate bodhisattvas — have never been explicated. This catalog lays the groundwork for a serious discussion of trans-Pacific acculturation: first[…]

Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty

Published: 07/28/2022

Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty tackles “legacy” issues of intellectual property rights (IPR) in artistic production and academic scholarship and proposes a category or class of works that has no relation to IPR nor to proprietary regimes of copyright and academic privilege. Keeney’s book is a structuralist argument for establishing new forms of[…]

Metagestures

Published: 05/31/2019

What kinds of knowledge and understandings of the world can be generated – and shared – when we use para-academic techniques and sensibilities to decode or respond to relatively orthodox intellectual objects? And what worlds might be possible if we practiced scholarly work from a place of collaboration and pleasure, as joyful fellow explorers? In[…]