Seven writings assembled in the context of the philosophy of art that Jean-Francois Lyotard developed in the 1980s, at the time of the Differend (1983) and of the "Kantian turn" leading to the Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1992), are here published for the first time in English translation. The texts focus on three artists with widely divergent aesthetic orientations: the colorist-draftsman Valerio Adami, the conceptual metaphysician Shusaku Arakawa, and Daniel Buren, the "pragmatist of the invisible."

These three protagonists share the notion that the...