Criticism & Theory

Harald Szeemann is associated with some of the most important artistic developments of the postwar era. A passionate advocate of avant-garde movements like conceptualism and post minimalism, he collaborated with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce...

A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery. -Rebecca Bengal In Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, Rebecca Bengal considers the...

"Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it."-Ernst FischerReissued with an introduction by John Berger, The Necessity of Art is a beautifully...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780399531972Author John DeweyFormat PaperbackPage Count 371Imprint Perigee Books,U.S.Publisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 301g

A revelatory consideration of the wide-ranging practice of one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century A pioneer of minimalism and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) is best known for his monumental wall drawings. LeWitt's broad...

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant...

In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism. Subtitled Upon the...

An artist's obsession with Gericault's monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa, and an intensely personal reckoning that delves deep inside the making of an artwork. Artist Tom de Freston has long had an obsession with Gericault's painting The Raft...

This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780854882489Author Sarah CookFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Whitechapel GalleryPublisher Whitechapel GalleryWeight(grams) 540g

A Beautiful Anarchy is a vulnerable, honest, and insightful book about the human longing to create, whether you're creating a family, a business, a book, or a photograph. Your greatest creation can be an intentional life lived on your own terms. What is...

In Renaissance Florence, certain paintings and sculptures of the Virgin Mary and Christ were believed to have extraordinary efficacy in activating potent sacred intercession. Cults sprung up around these "miraculous images" in the city and surrounding...

The self as a subject is one of the most fascinating and fruitful of artistic enterprises. From the 15th century to today, this collection brings together some of the best examples of self-portraiture to explore the genre's evolution over the centuries...

If virtuality is being celebrated as heralding a radically new era, rich with new possibilities and futures hitherto unimagined through cybernetics, networking and digitalizaton, such claims are also being viewed with deep scepticism and countered by...

'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.' Hilary Mantel, GuardianFeminist philosophy meets family memoir in a fresh essay collection by the award-winning essayist and novelist Siri Hustvedt, author of the...

Montage has been hailed as one of the key structural principles of modernity, yet its importance to the history of modern thought about cities and their architecture has never been adequately explored. In this groundbreaking new work, Martino Stierli...

'Art is theft,' Picasso once proclaimed, and much of the best and most 'original' new art involves an act or two of unequivocal, overt theft. Paradoxically, the law relating to artistic borrowing has grown more restrictive. 'The plagiarism and...

How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzales-Torres's artworks-piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles-as a path through questions of love and loss,...

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts...

Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA).Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis?...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781785420054Author Heather DavisFormat PaperbackPage Count 402Imprint Open Humanities PressPublisher Open Humanities PressWeight(grams) 588gDimensions(mm)...

The book examines how increasing engagement with the rest of the world transformed European art, architecture and design. It considers how commercial activity and colonial ventures gave rise to new and diverse forms of visual and material culture across...

The second revised edition of this classic book integrates text and pictures more clearly than in previous editions. Further illustrations have been added to include more colour diagrams and examples of current work done by students in recent years. The...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781399529839Author Mark HusseyFormat PaperbackPage Count 280Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University PressWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781913380625Author David ToppFormat PaperbackPage Count 302Imprint Goldsmith's PressPublisher Goldsmiths, Unversity of London

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590172131Author Joseph ConnorsFormat PaperbackPage Count 360Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...

This text by Julian Bell, himself a painter, confronts the uncertainty and suspicion many people feel about art today. It sets out to challenge received ideas while addressing questions such as what is it that defines paintings?; and what does the...

From amateur experiments in scrapbooks and stereographs to contemporary photobook collaborations between leading practitioners, poets and photographers have created an art form that continues to evolve and deserves critical exploration. Photopoetry...

A lethal cocktail of memoir and criticism.A documentary through the speaker's post-adolescent relationships.An arrangement of time in Chemnitz, Bergen, Dublin, Paris, Gwangju, Munich and Madrid.An intimate portrayal of unstable masculinity and sexual...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783956795343Author Beatrice Von BismarckFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Sternberg PressPublisher Sternberg PressWeight(grams) 499gDimensions(mm) 232mm...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781584350286Author Jean BaudrillardFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint Semiotext (E)Publisher AutonomediaWeight(grams) 386gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm *...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783956795855Author Brad HaylockFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Sternberg PressPublisher Sternberg PressWeight(grams) 354gDimensions(mm) 213mm * 132mm...

Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the founders of art history as a discipline. This is the first general introduction to the work of the celebrated Austrian who brought complex philosophical considerations to bear on art and its history. Ranging easily...

This guide provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies. Provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies. Explains the origins and development of the term Gothic. Explores the...

In the early 20th century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. In an age of secularism and materialism, artworks would be understood as merely things among other things. This meant an attack on the...

In modern western history, the cultural and social developments of modernism have long been associated with Jews. For conservative groups this has been a negative association: the perceived breakdown of traditional norms was blamed on Jewish influence in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262611053Author Rosalind E. KraussFormat PaperbackPage Count 366Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdWeight(grams) 590gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 178mm *...

Updated and reorganized to offer the best collection of state-of-the-art readings on the role of critical theory in contemporary art, this second edition of Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 brings together scholarly essays, artists' statements, and...

In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska maps the creation of feminist counterpublics around the world-spaces of protest and ideas, community and common struggle, that can challenge the emergence of fascist states as...

'the mundane becomes special as soon as you pay attention to it' - Susan HillerThis essential guide delves into the techniques, routines and mindsets of boundary-shifting artists, and the ways in which seeing differently can lead to creating something...