Ever since the renaissance, the female body has been a primary symbol of artistic beauty in the West. With the advent of the avant-garde and modernist art, beauty became suspect. This work explores how this happened, tracing the century's troubled relationship with beauty.
Ever since the renaissance, the female body has been a primary symbol of artistic beauty in the West. With the advent of the avant-garde and modernist...
At the age of eighteen, Mary Shelley, while staying in the Swiss Alps with her lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, conceived the tale of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and the monster he brings to life. The resulting book, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, is a dark parable warning against the risks of scientific and creative endeavor, the corrupting influence of technology and progress, and the dangers of knowledge without understanding. Frankenstein was an instant bestseller on publication in 1818 and has long been regarded as a masterpiece of suspense, a classic of...
At the age of eighteen, Mary Shelley, while staying in the Swiss Alps with her lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, conceived the tale of Dr. ...
Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria's Secret and America's Next Top Model to the snapshots we post on Facebook and Twitter, our culture is fixated on the pose, the state of existing simultaneously as artifice and the real thing.
In this bold view of contemporary culture, Wendy Steiner shows us the very meaning of the arts in the process of transformation. Her story begins at the turn of the last century, as the arts abandoned the representation of the world for a heady embrace of the abstract, the surreal, and the self-referential. Today though, this "separate...
Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria's Secret and America's Next Top Model to the snapshots we post on Facebook and Twitter, our c...