As a child of postmodernism, Swiss artist David Renggli weaves popular culture and art historical topoi into a homogeneous whole with playful ease in his work. The starting point of this book is Renggli's exhibition "The Charm of Ignorance" (2013) at the Museum Bellpark in Kriens. Renggli mounted around 2000 images in a rigid St. Petersburg hanging style. The collages intertwine opposites by drawing from images of fashion magazines and pornographic magazines, art catalogs, and found photography. The viewer becomes lost in the act of looking and enters a trance-like state. The staging is a celebration of the creative act, producing an immense number of individual works in a state of creative acceleration— the artist works on each image for about three minutes. At first glance, they seem familiar, but upon closer inspection, their surreal-grotesque absurdity is revealed to the viewer. Moments of surprise and redundancy as an aesthetic principle are recurring themes in Renggli's work, leading to a wondrous state of ambivalence that connects us to both sides of a problem, embracing the both-and. 497/2000 gathers a selection of nearly 500 of the originally around 2000 collages, which are randomly rearranged repeatedly during the printing process—each book thus becomes a unique piece.