As with all publications that accompany “major retrospectives”, I tried to be rational, but in this case, the considerations that as a rule make it totally unadvisable to fork out for the catalogue didn’t hold up. It’s heavy, to be sure, but not as exceptionally heavy as the memorable tome on Gober at the Schaulager. And it’s packed with text, but not discouragingly so; actually, the articles by Klaus Görner, Chrissie Iles, and Shepherd Steiner are so informative and well-written that they’re invaluable reading for anyone who’s a fan of Jack Goldstein (and if you aren’t, there’s no point in buying this book, since it’s about Jack Goldstein, the whole Jack Goldstein, and nothing but Jack Goldstein). But what really drove me to make the purchase is that it includes the full text — printed here for the first time — of the 1985 interview that Chris Dercon conducted at the artist’s studio in New York. To quote Goldstein: “(…)There’s no resolution, you know? it's purely fascination.”