Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Criticism & Theory

According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on...

Leo Steinberg s classic "Other Criteria" comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public and the flatbed picture plane to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and Jasper Johns. The latter, which Francine du Plessix Gray called a tour de force of critical method, is widely regarded as the most eye-opening analysis of the Johns s work ever written. This edition includes a new preface and a handful of additional illustrations.
The art book of the year, if not of the decade and possibly of the century. . ....

Concentrating on canonical critical texts and images, the book examines modern art through a rhetoric of representation rather than through formalist criticism or the history of the avant-garde.

Pastiche
Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature

Ingeborg Hoesterey

Traces the rise of the pastiche in the arts and popular culture.

In the last two decades cultural theorists and artists have redefined a genre of artistic expression that for centuries was regarded as both elusive and notorious: the pastiche, or pasticcio. Today, highly engaging manifestations of the genre minor can be found in architecture, painting, and mixed media installations; in film, literature, and performance modes ranging from the operatic to rock event; and in supposedly trivial discourses...

The passage of time and the reality of an aging survivor population have made it increasingly urgent to document and give expression to testimony, experience, and memory of the Holocaust. At the same time, artists have struggled to find a language to describe and retell a legacy often considered "unimaginable." Contrary to those who insist that the Holocaust defies representation, Image and Remembrance demonstrates that artistic representations are central to the practice of remembrance and commemoration. Including essays on representations of the Holocaust in film, architecture, painting,...

The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the...

This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it--to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he...

What John C. Welchman calls the "blazing network of focused conflations" from which Mike Kelley's styles are generated is on display in all its diversity in this second volume of the artist's writings. The first volume, Foul Perfection, contained thematic essays and writings about other artists; this collection concentrates on Kelley's own work, ranging from texts in "voices" that grew out of scripts for performance pieces to expository critical and autobiographical writings.Minor Histories organizes Kelley's writings into five sections. "Statements" consists of twenty pieces produced...

Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for...

In the 1980s, when the American art market flourished, critics were heavily concerned with theory. In The Aesthete in the City David Carrier offers a personal view on the artistic activity of that decade. He begins with a theoretical perspective on the relationship between two very different forms of artwriting: art criticism and art history writing. Carrier surveys the developments within theory during the 1980s, focusing on constructive critical analysis of the then fashionable work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, T. J. Clark, and Jacques Derrida. He provides detailed...

What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments.

Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly...