Written between the 1990s and today, Boris Groys's essays on the entropic logic of culture, art and the museum, on the collection, the politics of the avant-garde and the media character of man and reality - the theory of the media is the ideology of our time - they are brilliant exercises in intellectual fencing. They combine theoretical rigor and a clear and elegant style with a sagacity that the author manages with subtlety. Groys measures his strength against the most difficult opponent for an essayist: his own present. Almost all the essays begin with reverence for established ideas, but end each stroke leaving the reader quite shocked that he continues to reflect, because he wishes to think things differently.