Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Criticism & Theory

In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by...

In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.

Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices...

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.

After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we...

Kazimir Malevich's painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich's contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art--which he called Suprematism--and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian...

The French Republic--with its rallying cry for liberty, equality, and fraternity--emerged in 1870, and by 1880 had developed a coherent republican ideology. The regime pursued secular policies and emphasized its commitment to science and technology. Naturalism was an ideal aesthetic match for the republican ideology; it emphasized that art should be drawn from the everyday world, that all subjects were worthy of treatment, and that there should be flexibility in representation to allow for different voices.

Art of the Actual examines the use of naturalism in the 19th-century....

The New Art History provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental changes which have occurred in both the institutions and practice of art history over the last thirty years.

Jonathan Harris examines and accounts for the new approaches to the study of art which have been grouped loosely under the term 'the new art history'. He distinguishes between these and earlier forms of 'radical' or 'critical' analysis, explores the influence of other disciplines and traditions on art history, and relates art historical ideas and values to social change.

Structured...

This companion volume to the author's Learning to Look at Paintings suggests that the best way to understand modern art is to look closely at it, and to consider the different elements that make up each art work: composition, space and form, light and colour, and subject matter.

Engaging and beautifully-written, this guide to art of the modern and postmodern period covers key art movements including:

• Expressionism
• Constructivism
• the Bauhaus
• Surrealism
• Pop Art
• Conceptual Art
• Young British Art
...

Bestselling novels by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a multitude of others have enchanted us by blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Their genre of writing has been variously defined as 'magic', 'magical' or 'marvellous' realism and is quickly becoming a core area of literary studies. This guide offers a first step for those wishing to consider this area in greater depth, by:

• exploring the many definitions and terms used in relation to the genre
• tracing the origins of the movement in painting and fiction
• offering an...

In this pioneering book, Christopher Whitehead provides an overview and critique of art interpretation practices in museums and galleries. Covering the philosophy and sociology of art, traditions in art history and art display, the psychology of the aesthetic experience and ideas about learning and communication, Whitehead advances major theoretical frameworks for understanding interpretation from curators' and visitors' perspectives. Although not a manual, the book is deeply practical. It presents extensively researched European and North American case studies involving interviews with...

Offering a unique 'debate' format, the third edition of the bestselling Arguing About Art is ideal for newcomers to aesthetics or philosophy of art.

This lively collection presents an extensive range of short, clear introductions to each of the discussions which include:

• sentimentality
• appreciation
• interpretation
• understanding
• objectivity
• nature
• food
• horror.

With revised introductions, updated suggestions for further reading and new sections on pornography and societies...

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.

The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim...

Renaissance Theory presents an animated conversation among art historians about the optimal ways of conceptualizing Renaissance art, and the links between Renaissance art and contemporary art and theory. This is the first discussion of its kind, involving not only questions within Renaissance scholarship, but issues of concern to art historians and critics in all fields. Organized as a virtual roundtable discussion, the contributors discuss rifts and disagreements about how to understand the Renaissance and debate the principal texts and authors of the last thirty years who have sought to...

Artistic representations of landscape are studied widely in areas ranging from art history to geography to sociology, yet there has been little consensus about how to understand the relationship between landscape and art. This book brings together more than fifty scholars from these multiple disciplines to establish new ways of thinking about landscape in art.