Flamingo, Stardust, Caesar’s Palace–the sparkling neon signs that tower over the grand casinos and hotels on the Las Vegas strip are familiar not just in name but in fame. Las Vegas, that desert town built from sand, poker chips, and free buffets, has come to symbolize a certain kind of American culture that deals in extremes of mediatization, simulacra, privatization, and entertainment. Photographer Andreas Schmidt has taken his lens to the city, altering it in such a way that it appears anew: blurred, seen from a passing car, reversed, or reflected in a window pane. A master of the unexpected and the unusual perspective, Schmidt takes super-wide-angle shots of the spectacular Vegas skyline, sandwiching it into the narrow horizontal gap between two levels of dark concrete pilings in a parking garage. He makes endless hotel corridors vanish into nothingness. He flows vast, empty convention halls and their wildly twilled carpets together to form absurd, magnificent patterns. In Schmidt’s Las Vegas series, the glamour and glitter of the strip is exposed as pure fa ade, as the ultimate collective act of megalomania–but without ever losing any of its fascinating, perverse allure.

The BMW Art Guide by Independent Collectors presents more than 160 private collections of contemporary art that are open to the public—both large and small, prominent and little known. Succinct portraits of the collections and numerous color illustrations take the reader to over thirty countries, often to out-of-the-way regions or urban districts. This practical guide is the first publication to be coproduced by BMW and the Independent Collectors, the international online network for collectors of contemporary art. Collectors, dealers, artists, and journalists contributed to the extensive research required for the compilation of this new standard work. A comparable list of international private collections has never before been assembled, either in book form or on the Internet, and some of these collections are opening their doors for the first time to art lovers and experts. Collections featured (selection): Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), White Rabbit – Contemporary Chinese Art Collection, Lyon Housemuseum, Essl Museum – Kunst der Gegenwart, Museum Liaunig Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary – Atelier Augarten (T-B A21), Maison Particulière, Vanhaerents Art Collection, Verbeke Foundation, Inhotim – Instituto de Arte Contemporânea & Jardim Botânico, Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Domus Collection, Collection Lambert, La Maison Rouge, Rosenblum Collection, Museum Frieder Burda, Sammlung Boros, Sammlung Haubrok, Sammlung Hoffmann, Museum Biedermann, Julia Stoschek Collection, Sammlung Goetz, The Walther Collection, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sammlung Schroth, Sammlung Grässlin – Kunstraum Grässlin & Räume für Kunst, Das Maximum, Jupiter Artland, Saatchi Gallery, Zabludowicz Collection, Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Devi Art Foundation, Il Giardino dei Lauri, Collezione Gori – Fattoria di Celle, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, La Colección Júmex, Art Stations Foundation, Berezdivin Collection – Espacio 1414, The Hess Art Collection, Fundació Suñol, Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear, Fondation Beyeler, Hallen für Neue Kunst Schaffhausen, Girls’ Club, The Menil Collection, De la Cruz, Collection Contemporary Art Space, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Rubell Family, Collection / Contemporary Arts Foundation, World Class Boxing, Western Bridge

Double documents the exhibition series at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. Within the framework of that series, ten historical exhibitions originally taking place at the legendary Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven were reproduce. Schneiders work N. Schmidt formed the point of departure, and then came to serve as a platform for presentations by Reiner Ruthenbeck, Lawrence Weiner, Gerhard Richter, Sol LeWitt, Isa Genzken, Abramovic/Ulay, Wolfgang Laib, Andreas Slominski and Anri Sala already realized in Bremerhaven in identical form in the past. The project thus united the art-historical depiction of the Kabinetts history with Schneiders artistic intentions, and thus lent itself to viewing and interpretation on very different levels.