Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Criticism & Theory

The essays in "Virgin Microbe" foreground thematic issues and advance recent theoretical agendas, such as the study of identity construction and the relationship between the avant-garde and mass culture, rather than focusing on biographies of individual Dadaists or centers of Dada activity. The authors represent a wider spectrum of disciplines and a broader international perspective than other recent collections on Dada. Ambitious in terms of contemporary academic interests, "Virgin Microbe" draws on a rich spectrum of intellectual traditions and contexts, prioritizing Dada s metaphysical...

A discussion of Theodor Adorno s Aesthetic Theory is bound to look significantly different today than it would have looked when the book was first published in 1970, or when it first appeared in English translation in the 1980s. In The Fleeting Promise of Art, Peter Uwe Hohendahl reexamines Aesthetic Theory along with Adorno s other writings on aesthetics in light of the unexpected return of the aesthetic to today s cultural debates.

Is Adorno s aesthetic theory still relevant today? Hohendahl answers this question with an emphatic yes. As he shows, a...

In an ancient account of painting s origins, a woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions.
Exploring these artists work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of...

The job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantly revising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance of the work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessment and reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the "post-medium condition" -- the abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. Jean-Francois Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is characterized by the end of a "master narrative," and Krauss sees in the...