Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Center for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German Critique.
A little repetitive, since it's comprised of essays written over the course of about a decade. The final essay is an excellent summation of the different strains of postmodernism from the 60s through the early 80s in both the US and Europe, and also contains a very convincing section arguing that the conflation of post-structuralist theory with postmodernism in the US is fallacious, and that post-structuralism is in fact a theory of modernity.
The essays in Part 1 and Part 3 leading up to the final essay serve as mostly background material and can be safely skipped unless one wants to read more about the historical avant-garde, Pop art, etc. Part 2 consists of only tangentially-related essays about individual art works.
There are a couple historical narratives worth watching in this book. One is the appropriation of surrealism by the Modernist movement. I am very interested in how Huyssen describes this historical moment, where surrealism began in reaction to the distance modernism attempted to create between art and a general public. And then Modernism's subsequent appropriation of surrealism's artistic impulse. Perhaps this is general art history, but it was my first interaction with it.
But what I find even more fascinating is that the book is written as a study on Germany's experience of art, and I think Huyssen does an excellent job describing the cultural challenge artists encountered coming to a national understanding post World War II. It has significantly influenced my thoughts on how art practices relevance in general society.