Over the past several years, when artist/critic/educator/writer Joe Scanlan was reading a lot of seminal economic texts, he noticed that a strange thing kept happening: where the original authors were talking about absentee ownership, stagnating markets, colonialism and government subsidies, Scanlan heard them talking about artists’ neighborhoods, Chelsea galleries, tae kwon do lessons, and Jack Kerouac.

Fascinated with these recurrent, uncontrollable synapses, Scanlan rewrote the texts as he heard them in his head and color-coded each alteration. Produced for his 2009 exhibition at castillo/corrales in Paris, Joe Scanlan’s Red Flags consists of four essays that the artist has refracted from original texts by Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman, and Edward Said. Elegantly designed by Francesca Grassi, the book’s text is laid out in horizontal segments that utilize Scanlan’s color coding method to designate which portions of text have been moved, altered, rewritten, added, or left intact.