From Anselm Kiefer to Damien Hirst, Sophie Calle to Björk, William Kentridge to Alejandro Iñárritu, and many others. Fifteen artists for fifteen total works of art, monumental, rich in cultural references, epics of the present, endless elegies in which languages, styles and sensibilities hybridize and reinvent themselves: thus reinventing the world, our world, the chaotic and fragmented world of the new millennium. Vincenzo Trione sets up an original museum at once imaginary and possible, labyrinthine yet unequivocal in its outcome: The Interminable Work is a first, fundamental, necessary canon of 21st-century art.

"A profound and beautifully written book about artists you wish you knew. A read with literary qualities."
Orhan Pamuk

What do artists like Kiefer, Kentridge, Boltanski, Barney and Hirst, writers and poets with a deep visual vocation like Pamuk and Balestrini, filmmakers like Iñárritu and Greenaway, visionary musicians like Björk and creators of celebrated stage sets like Es Devlin have in common? They are very different artists, with unique histories and sensibilities: yet, they all share the idea of art creating monumental, plural, ambitious world-works, sometimes impossible to relocate or rearrange. The fifteen artists at the center of this book are creators of worlds: their works are authentic cosmogonies, open territories, mobile and ubiquitous, in which distant practices and languages - painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, video, music, literature - intersect and reinvent themselves: thus reinventing the world, our world, the chaotic and fragmented world of the new millennium. Vincenzo Trione sets up for the reader an original museum at once imaginary and possible, real and potential, hybrid and multiform. And, as in a museum, Trione starts from the works, recounting their genesis, their multiple senses, their mysteries (also with the support of preparatory sketches, projects, direct testimonies of the artists). But it is the sum of the parts that brings out the ambitious and unexpected design that works and artists go to make up: the revival and revival of the Renaissance and Romantic utopia of the total work of art. The interminable work is a first, fundamental, necessary canon of 21st century art.