The Miraculous

A collection of vignettes on contemporary art from critic and poet Raphael Rubenstein.

The first single-author book to be published by Paper Monument, Raphael Rubinstein's The Miraculous presents the artistic avant-gardes of the last five decades as a tapestry of incidents as fascinating and unlikely as any collection of myths or legends.

Thinking more of Kafka’s Parables than Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Rubinstein composes a series of micro-narratives celebrating the mystery and ingeniousness of these human activities which, for lack of a better term, we call “contemporary art.”

Featuring writing on fifty artists, including as Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Lee Lozano, Tseng Kwong Chi, Cindy Sherman, David Hammons, and R.H. Quaytman.

The Miraculous is a singular, refreshing trip through contemporary avant-garde art.

Raphael Rubinstein is Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston, USA. He is a New York based art critic and poet and in 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014, The Silo was given a Best Blog Award of Excellence by the International Association of Art Critics. In April 2017, The Miraculous: Houston, a public-art installation by artist and wife Heather Bause Rubinstein, based on his book The Miraculous, debuted as part of the CounterCurrent Festival.