Aleksandra Kaminska made a very good decision to explore Polish media art in an expanded field. In our post-media age, media art gets dispersed and, as such, is no longer a discrete phenomenon. The media are becoming instruments of heterogeneous artistic expressions and neither make up a separate art discipline nor turn creative practitioners who use them into a distinctive group of media artists. Addressing the practice of artists who work with the media, Kaminska attends both to the themes their works explore and to their local embedment. She insists that art making is a local product—a product “of site-specific ecologies and histories” (15)—and seeks to investigate it as such. Having defined a very narrow time frame of her research, she focuses on the years 2004–2009: on the immediate aftermath of Poland's accession to the EU. She believes that, in such circumstances, art abandoned its autonomy and became steeped in politics, while artists engaged in negotiating the basic social values, such as, above all, identity, social order, and place-specificity. Kaminska underscores the relevance of critical attitudes and experimentation as a method of art making. As she enquires into how artistic histories, pursuits, and conditions get inscribed into media-art practices, she historically reflects on her chosen period, looking back first of all to the directly preceding years, but also to the historical avant-gardes.

In investigating her field, Kaminska assumes the position of an outsider, a foreigner. Since non-Polish readers are her target group, she must align her book with the dominant western approaches to art. Alongside internationally acclaimed Polish artists, she discusses the works of artists who are less or even barely recognizable outside Poland. Her own perspective of a Polish-speaking outsider grants her insights an interpretive freshness and brings in conceptual paradigms that are rarely used to analyze the phenomena she examines. As a result, Kaminska's book is highly original and valuable not only to her implied readership. My only objections concern some of Kaminska's assumptions and their ramifications since, I believe, some of them do not promote an adequate image of Polish media art.

I am rather uneasy about the time frame and the interpretive framework Kaminska chose. She assumes that specific socio-political circumstances compelled artists to face up to the challenges produced by Poland's EU accession while, actually, many of them were responding to entirely different problems and their art did not fit into Kaminska's paradigm. Given this, Kaminska's choice seems somewhat artificial. Several important developments in art commenced in the 1990s, and several others have evolved into their full-fledged form only in our decade. Admittedly, Kaminska is flexible, and her account goes beyond her time frame; yet the evidence for her claim that something extraordinary happened in Polish media art in 2004–2009 is rather threadbare.

Kaminska's choice of artists raises some objections. The focus on and the attribution of central relevance to the period of 2004–2009 determined the selection of artists and artworks to exemplify the developments the book frames as pivotal. I do not question this selection as such, for indeed, it paints a different landscape of early twenty-first century media art in Poland than the one to which we have been used. However, I acutely missed Anna Baumgart and Anna Konik in Kaminska's account. In the period her book covers, both artists produced some very important artworks and, moreover, their respective careers go back to earlier years and continue into the following decade.

The work of the omitted artists may shed quite a different light on the autonomy of art. Namely, art does not simply relinquish its autonomy, unlike Kaminska implies. Rather, this autonomy is re-cast. As Baumgart and Konik construct a transnational perspective, their art develops between here and somewhere else and, consequently, regains an autonomy that approximates, but does not overlap with, universalist aspirations. Their work fosters creative and meaningful relationships between universality and localness, as well as between historicity and permanence, and in doing so it establishes glocal frameworks for the negotiation of values. As similar examples can be multiplied, the idea that Polish media art forsook autonomy for socio-political involvements is patently open to criticism.

The pre-1989 international recognizability of Polish art is a more complex issue than Kaminska makes it out to be. While the artworks of Polish painters and sculptors were, indeed, nearly absent from the international art circuit prior to 1990, this is by and large not true about avant-garde filmmakers from Poland, whose films were shown at prominent international events throughout the 1970s.

The identification of Poland as part of east central Europe begs more accuracy. Another unfounded generalization reproduced by Kaminska is a detrimental belief that the art of eastern and central Europe makes up a coherent set of developments and, consequently, that judgments referring to one of them are equally valid in relation to the other ones. Such a holistic perspective is far too undiscriminating when applied to art. It passes over special traits that determine the uniqueness of art practiced in particular settings. That various artists shared the same geopolitical fate and entered the political structures of the EU together did not abolish the heterogeneity and the historical distinctiveness of their respective artistic backgrounds.

The objections above do not qualify my general opinion that Aleksandra Kaminska's book is one of the most interesting studies of contemporary art in Poland. Locating her argument in intersecting contexts and frameworks, Kaminska offers a novel account of Polish media art and shows, within the paradigm she adopted, how contemporary artists in Poland negotiate their identities and face up to new challenges.