Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?: On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity

ISBN-13: 9780415919425 / Angielski / Miękka / 1999 / 320 str.

James Elkins

Opis

With bracing clarity, Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the 20th century than they had been in any previous century. 50 illustrations.

Recenzje

"Elkin's book...is a gentle jab at his profession's habit of generating 'intricate and voluminous' interpretations of paintings." -- Inside Publishing
"...Elkins argues that all our responses to pictures vacillate between conflicting desires to interpret, or read, and merely to see. He tracks these impulses from one extreme-- in ancient writing systems and mathematical notation-- to another, in modern abstract painting that tries to contrive a purely optical experience. The survey is arduous, but it is also fascinating." -- The San Francisco Chronicle
"Cogent, conversational and lucid, this book provides a useful, nuanced understanding of what ordinary viewers today share with 'the discipline [that] thrives on the pleasure of problems well solved'." -- Publisher's Weekly
"A daring challenge to all those who would continue to defend art history's status as a positivistic discipline... a dazzling intellectual achievement." -- Keith Moxey, Barnard College
"Written with crystalline elegance and analytical rigor, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? will be of interest not only to students of visual culture, but also to anyone concerned with interpretation in the humanities as a whole." -- Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley

Spis treści

INTRODUCTION: MUTILATED FIRE UNITE PART 1 CONSIDERING THINGS 1 THE EVIDENCE OF EXCESS 2 WHAT COUNTS AS COMPLEXITY? PART 2 STAYING CALM 3 HOW TO SOLVE PICTURE PUZZLES 4 AN AMBILOGY OF PAINTED MEANINGS 5 ON MONSTROUSLY AMBIGUOUS PAINTINGS 6 CALMING THE DELIRIUM OF INTERPRETATION PART 3 LOSING CONTROL 7 HIDDEN IMAGES: CRYPTOMORPHS, ANAMORPHS, AND ALEAMORPHS 8 THE BEST WORK OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART HISTORY 9 ENVOI: ON MEANINGLESSNESS

O autorze

James Elkins is Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including What Painting Is (Routledge, 1998) and The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (1996).