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.
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 pre...
Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts examines art historical writing as an expressive medium, capable of emotion and reflection - and therefore deserving of serious consideration for its own sake, as the testament of art history and of individual historians. Elkins asks such questions as: How do various art historical approaches represent works of art? What can they see, and what must they miss? And what insight does such writing offer us about ourselves? Drawing on analyses of texts by Derrida, Deleuze and other leading critics, as well as illustrations of artworks from various...
Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts examines art historical writing as an expressive medium, capable of emotion and reflection - and theref...
This title is an investigation into paintings and the emotions they evoke. James Elkins tells the story of paintings that have made people cry, contrasting the emotions shown before works of art in the past, and the tearlessness with which most people approach works of art today.
This title is an investigation into paintings and the emotions they evoke. James Elkins tells the story of paintings that have made people cry, contra...
This intimate history of art demonstrates persuasively that there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about themselves, about other cultures - and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. But each of us also has our own story of art, a kind of private art history made up of the pieces we have seen, and loved or hated, the effects they had on us, and the connections that might be drawn among them. Elkins opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. What about all the art not produced in Western Europe or in the...
This intimate history of art demonstrates persuasively that there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about themselves, a...
Elkins begins by demonstrating the arbitrariness of current criteria used by art historians for selecting images for study. He urges scholars to adopt, instead, the far broader criteria of the young field of image studies. After analyzing the philosophic underpinnings of this interdisciplinary field, he surveys the entire range of images, from calligraphy to mathematical graphs and abstract painting. Throughout, Elkins blends philosophic analysis with historical detail to produce a startling new sense of such basic terms as pictures, writing, and notation.
Elkins begins by demonstrating the arbitrariness of current criteria used by art historians for selecting images for study. He urges scholars to adopt...
Perspective has been a divided subject, orphaned among various disciplines from philosophy to gardening. In the first book to bring together recent thinking on perspective from such fields as art history, literary theory, aesthetics, psychology, and the history of mathematics, James Elkins leads us to a new understanding of how we talk about pictures. Elkins provides an abundantly illustrated history of the theory and practice of perspective. Looking at key texts from the Renaissance to the present, he traces a fundamental historical change that took place in the way in which perspective was...
Perspective has been a divided subject, orphaned among various disciplines from philosophy to gardening. In the first book to bring together recent th...
Art criticism was once passionate, polemical, and judgmental; now critics are more often interested in ambiguity, neutrality, and nuanced description. And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that sifting through a countless array of colorful periodicals and catalogs makes criticism seem to slip even further from our grasp? In this pamphlet, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism,...
Art criticism was once passionate, polemical, and judgmental; now critics are more often interested in ambiguity, neutrality, and nuanced description....
