Over the past decade Installation art has achieved mainstream status within contemporary visual culture. Its ascendancy has given rise to new terms and affected not just art but also fashion, movie design, and club culture.

The new "immersive" Installation reflects a desire for sensual pleasure, as the viewer is totally enveloped in a hermetic and narcissistic artwork, as illustrated by the American artist Doug Aitken and the Japanese artist Kazuo Katase, among others. New dynamics have developed between the artist and institutions, and Installation is more than ever an open-ended experiment that transforms the museum into a cultural laboratory, as seen in the work of Hans Haacke. Installation refuses to accept fixed boundaries, and practitioners, such as the Mexican Jose Dávila, are now looking to forge relationships of exchange on a global level, collaborating with specialists in other non-art areas. In a rapidly changing world, time and memory become key concerns, and artists such as Christian Boltanksi and Damien Hirst prefer to construct their own spaces of memory. The culmination of these processes has made the audience itself the key site of the Installation, as witnessed in the works of Vanessa Beecroft, Gary Hill, Mariko Mori, and Bill Viola.

Introduced by Jonathan Crary, Professor of Art History, Columbia University, the book is completed by a chronology, details on the works included in the book, further reading, and an index. 317 illustrations, 268 in color.