Criticism & Theory

What does the breathtakingly beautiful art depicted on the walls of caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, tell us about the nature of the ancestral mind? How did these images spring, seemingly from nowhere into the human story? The Mind in the...

The central argument of "Chromophobia" is that a chromophobic impulse - a fear of corruption or contamination through colour - lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour,...

Quinten Massys' An Old Woman ('The Ugly Duchess') is one of the Renaissance's most famous faces. In a fresh review of the iconic image, this book unveils the painting's original context: its status as a pioneering work of satirical art, its debt to...

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the artist's birth, this book is the intended to be a faithful posthumous execution of the project. Containing a wealth of unpublished materials, and representing a decade of work and research, it promises to be the...

Practice-led research is a burgeoning area across the creative arts, with studio informed doctorates frequently favoured over traditional approaches to research. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry is specifically designed as a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783956792212Author Boris GroysFormat PaperbackPage Count 296Imprint Sternberg PressPublisher Sternberg PressWeight(grams) 666gDimensions(mm) 203mm * 133mm *...

Communicology is Vilem Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that...

Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we...

A Village Voice Book, this seminal work presents new models of vision and examines modern theories of seeing.About the AuthorHal Foster is Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in...

In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of...

As a novelist, essayist, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers...

In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of...

Milkyways is a collection of essays by artist Camille Henrot, exploring the ambivalence of motherhood and the process of creation in both art-making and life. Each chapter delivers a cosmos of references in literature, cartoons, art history,...

A lively meditation on the nature of art by one of America's most celebrated art critics What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part...

This volume is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases.Addressing...

Providing a thorough and comprehensive introduction to the study of photography, this second edition of Photography: The Key Concepts has been expanded and updated to cover more fully contemporary changes to photography. Photography is a part of everyday...

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...

A collection of by turns polemical and personal writings and interviews from conceptual artist and commentator Glenn Ligon in an accessible paperback volume. This long-awaited and essential publication collects three decades of writings and interviews...

This volume is an in-depth and exquisitely illustrated guide to the Second Age of Middle-earth, one of the least-explored periods of Arda's history.The Illustrated World of Tolkien: The Second Age, is the follow up companion to the best-selling The...

This book provides an accessible introduction to aesthetics, especially in relation to literature, and is particularly useful for readers new to literary theory and contemporary philosophy. Anne Sheppard discusses what it is that all works of art have in...

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, Andre Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojeve defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, "The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky," endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting...

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781910761076Author Lucy Finchett-MaddockFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint CounterpressPublisher Counterpress

'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ...In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of...

Governments around the world spend millions on art and cultural institutions, evidence of a basic human need for what the author refers to as 'creating aesthetic significance'. Yet what function or purpose does art satisfy in today's society? In this...

Featuring a handsome new package redesigned by the author himself, this edition is a must-have for fans and collectors of Luigi Serafini s art. First published in 1981 in Milan by F.M. Ricci, the book has been hailed as one of the most unusual yet...

In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the...

A groundbreaking look at the parallels between contemporary art and prehistoric art.About the AuthorLucy R. Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, and curator. She has authored twenty-three books, has curated more than fifty major...

Botticelli is one of the most admired artists of the Renaissance period and his seductive Venus and graceful Primavera are among the world's most recognisable works of art. This catalogue raisonne of Botticelli's paintings offers more than two hundred...

Why on earth do cars have the same symmetry as dragonflies? Is there really a beautiful swirling pattern lurking in every dripping tap? What do insect eggs have in common with planets, and why? In this exquisite book, the smallest and most concise ever...

Shortlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayA blazingly intelligent first collection of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief.With these pieces...

Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate. It is comprised of seven different essays, three of which are pictorial and the other containing texts and images. Berger first examines the relationship between...

Sets out an ordered system of the arts - music, painting, sculpture, narrative, poetry and tragedy - based on the precepts of German Idealism.Book InformationISBN 9780816616848Author F.W.J. SchellingFormat PaperbackPage Count 408Imprint University of...

This volume discusses the aesthetic and cognitive challenges of modern picturebooks from different countries, such as Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and USA. The overarching issue concerns the mutual relationship between...

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color red throughout the ages The color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege...

Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David...

A concise introduction to paintings in the Western European tradition, through the stories of 50 powerful artworks by artists from Van Gogh to da Vinci. How to Read Paintings is a valuable visual guide to Western European painting. Through a gallery...

"The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work."-Richard Serra Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume...

What terms do we use to describe and evaluate art, and how do we judge if art is good, and if it is for the social good? In How Art Can Be Thought Allan deSouza investigates such questions and the popular terminology through which art is discussed,...

This book is premised on the view that the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in...