Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Art & Politics

"I suggest that although at any given place and moment the aesthetic expressions of a political system just are that political system, the concepts are separable. Typically, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift in their meaning over time, or even are inverted or redeployed with an entirely transformed effect. You cannot understand politics without understanding the aesthetics of politics, but you cannot understand aesthetics as politics. The point is precisely to show the concrete nodes at which two distinct discourses coincide or connive, come apart or coalesce." from...

Snapshots taken by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners stripped naked, humiliated and tortured shocked the world in 2004 but, as this remarkable book relates, soldiers have taken photographs of the gruesome or sociable, shocking or mundane aspects of war for more than 100 years. Now, with the twenty-first century shift to simple digital photography and internet communications, a glut of highly disturbing images -- videos and stills -- is being posted on the inernet by western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, with alarming results. Private Pictures traces this unacknowledged genre of...

Between 1740 and 1780, Empress Maria Theresa governed the Habsburg Empire, a multilingual conglomeration of states centered on Austria. Although recent historical scholarship has addressed Maria Theresa's legacy, she remains entirely absent from art history despite her notable role in shaping eighteenth-century European diplomatic, artistic, and cultural developments. In Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art, Michael Yonan explores the role that material culture--paintings, architecture, porcelain, garden sculpture, and decorative objects--played in...

No longer represented only by Hollywood and the commercial fashion industry, Los Angeles in recent years has received international media attention as one of the world's new art centers. From the appearance of local artists in major European exhibitions to widely reported multimillion-dollar museum endowments, Los Angeles has entered the world cultural stage.

"Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles" places this celebrated arrival in the richer context of art controversies and political contests over modern art and art spaces in the twentieth century....