Criticism & Theory

Alchemy in Contemporary Art analyzes the manner in which twentieth-century artists, beginning with French Surrealists of the 1920s, have appropriated concepts and imagery from the western alchemical tradition. This study examines artistic production from...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262548809Author Jack BurnhamFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdWeight(grams) 454g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Winner of the 2009 Frank Jewett Mather Award given by the College Art Association (CAA). 2009.Book InformationISBN 9780262518680Author Boris GroysFormat...

For Kristeva, in a world immersed in readymade images, art or aesthetic experience is a practice that constitutes both a subject (a sense of self) and an object that is able to transform meaning and consciousness. 'Kristeva Reframed' examines key ideas...

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but...

What is art? What counts as an aesthetic experience? Does art have to beautiful? Can one reasonably dispute about taste? What is the relation between aesthetic and moral evaluations? How to interpret a work of art? Can we learn anything from literature,...

An innovative analysis of 1960s abstract sculpture that draws on transgender studies and queer theory Now back in print, Abstract Bodies was the first book to bridge the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies with the discipline of art history...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9788857246390Author Mary Jane JacobFormat PaperbackPage Count 280Imprint SkiraPublisher SkiraWeight(grams) 860g

Intertitles is an anthology of work situated at the intersection of writing and the visual arts. The anthology aims to explore their confluence and is conceived in response to a twofold observation: the increased presence of written, spoken and performed...

Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781846382574Author Richard BirkettFormat PaperbackPage Count 96Imprint Afterall PublishingPublisher Afterall Publishing

"Astounding... extraordinary... Jumping between highlighting his indie cult status as an artist and the mindset behind the abstraction of some of comics most beloved characters, the collection ultimately acts as a stunning visual love letter to one of...

Celebrated art critic and curator Guy Brett made a unique contribution to art criticism and exhibition making through his championing of experimental artists from across the world, writing seminal monographic essays on artists such as Susan Hiller, Rose...

When Trisha Low moves west, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive "somewhere better"-someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose...

Look At This If You Love Great Art is a must read for anyone with a passion for exceptional art. Featuring 100 of the best artworks ever produced, inside is a collection of insightful summaries on just what it is that makes each one so vital. Art writer...

In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative decolonial framework for visual culture studies, the field that he helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and countervisuality, or "the right to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780525560203Author Alexander NemerovFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam Inc

In Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781581152036Author Thomas McEvilleyFormat HardbackPage Count 768Imprint Allworth Press,U.S.Publisher Allworth Press,U.S.Weight(grams) 1021gDimensions(mm)...

Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age, leading critic...

Thoughtful Images demonstrates that there is a rich tradition of illustrations of philosophy that originated in Ancient Greece, spread throughout Europe, thrived in twentieth century America, and continues to this day. It is the first book to isolate...

Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity - sexual, racial, national - and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in...

A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass media This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and...

Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavour to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures, emphasises that "sight" and "site" but also "motion" and "emotion" are irrevocably connected. In so doing,...

Scottish zoologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's visionary ideas in On Growth and Form continue to evolve a century after its publication, aligning it with current developments in art and science. Practitioners, theorists, and historians from art, science,...

In this second volume of his classic essays on the Renaissance, E H Gombrich focuses on a theme of central importance: visual symbolism. He opens with a searching introduction ('The Aims and Limits of Iconology'), and follows with detailed studies of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783956793646Author Jon K ShawFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Sternberg PressPublisher Sternberg PressWeight(grams) 666gDimensions(mm) 197mm * 127mm *...

In October 2015, metal detectorist James Mather discovered an important Viking hoard near Watlington in South Oxfordshire. The hoard dates from the end of the 870s, a key moment in the struggle between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings for control of southern...

Today's artists have an unprecedented level of choice with regard to materials and methods available to them, yet the processes involved in making artworks are rarely addressed in books or exhibitions on art. Here, Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson...

A sequel to the pioneering volume, Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, published in 1982, The Expanding Discourse contains 29 essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, representing some of the best feminist...

Michael Fried's often controversial art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains 27 pieces, including the introduction to the catalogue for "Three American Painters," the text of his book "Morris Louis,"...

'Approaching the different and manifold sequences in this book...one will gradually come to realise that metamorphosis can become an ideal for knowledge, a guiding path for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world - as intuitive contemplation and as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262534369Author Byung-Chul HanFormat PaperbackPage Count 104Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdDimensions(mm) 178mm * 114mm * 6mm

Where do we begin to talk about abstract art? This question depends on one's worldview. From the point of view of the collection included in this book, the arc of abstraction is very broad, sweeping and multivalent. The essays included here take an open...

Michael Ann Holly asserts that historical interpretation of the pictorial arts is always the intellectual product of a dynamic exchange between past and present. Recent theory emphasizes the subjectivity of the historian and the ways in which any...

Land Art and Climate Action: Designing the 21st Century City Park highlights regenerative artworks that respond to this pivotal moment in human history and inspire viewers to embrace the beauty, abundance, and cultural vibrancy of a world that has left...

In Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France, Robyn Roslak examines for the first time the close relationship between neo-impressionist landscapes and cityscapes and the anarchist sympathies of the movement's artists. She focuses in...

What are the archives of gay and lesbian leather histories, and how have contemporary artists mined these archives to create a queer politics of the present? This book sheds light on an area long ignored by traditional art history and LGBTQ studies,...

Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions that are somewhere between art and politics. This book surveys the...

A collection of inspiring essays by the photographer Robert Adams, who advocates the meaningfulness of art in a disillusioned society In Art Can Help, the internationally acclaimed American photographer Robert Adams offers over two dozen meditations on...