Traces the theme of the banal, as per the subtitle, from Duchamp's "Fountain" to reality TV, in I guess culture and society. Hard to be sure whether Jost is postulating a causal chain from the incursion of the banal into high art to the glorification of triviality on TV, such that Duchamp, Warhol, Barthes and Robbe-Grillet are in part directly responsible for Big Brother, X Factor and all that, but it's an idea worth entertaining.
This was written in 2007; if it had come out this year, you could imagine there might be a chapter on the rise of populism and so-called "post-truth politics" on the same lines.