The Rail’s selection of the best art books of 2014.

In her essay in Forest Park, a new monograph on the artist Virgil Marti, critic Hilarie Sheets identifies Marti’s advent into the mainstream art world as his 2002 installation Grow Room.

For artists, the supposed dreamland art world of the ’60s in Lower Manhattan is almost painful to hear about. The idea of working part-time as a security guard at MoMA alongside future bigwigs like Robert Ryman and Dan Flavin and earning enough to pay $20 a month for a live-in loft/studio on the Bowery, while curating exhibitions of your friends’ work at soon-to-be-legendary galleries and developing cutting-edge artwork in a reality where cubes were conceptually exciting, leaves a lot to be desired from today’s New York.

What does the raw material of surveillance look like? How do you evaluate days of camera footage of a single street corner, or comprehensive maps marking the movement of a cell phone over the course of a single week?