Criticism & Theory

Creation and the giving of orders are closely entwined in Western culture, where God commands the world into existence and later issues the injunctions known as the Ten Commandments. The arche, or origin, is always also a command, and a beginning is...

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that...

We live in a world where nothing is untouched by supply chains—art included. In this major contribution to the study of contemporary culture and supply chains, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that...

Film is considered by some to be the most dominant art form of the twentieth century. It is many things, but it has become above all a means of telling stories through images and sounds. The stories are often offered to us as quite false, frankly and...

This is one of the classic books on craftsmanship and design. In it, David Pye explores the meaning of skill and its relationship to design and manufacture. Cutting through a century of fuzzy thinking, he proposes a new theory of making based on the...

This new survey covers the rich and varied history of participatory art, from early happenings and performances to current practices that demand audience interaction. As the internet mindset - browsing, sharing, collecting, producing - increasingly...

If an artist sends a live peacock to an exhibition, is it art? 'What is art?' is a question many of us want answered but are too afraid to ask. It is the very question that Nigel Warburton demystifies in this brilliant and accessible little book. With...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783956792106Author Thomas J. DemosFormat PaperbackPage Count 132Imprint Sternberg PressPublisher Sternberg PressWeight(grams) 666gDimensions(mm) 203mm *...

The latest publication by designer Kenya Hara following his acclaimed Designing Design. White is not a book about color. It is rather the author's attempt to explore the essence of "white," which he sees as being closely related to the origin of...

Renaissance bodies, dressed and undressed, have not lacked attention in art historical literature, but scholarship on the male body has generally concentrated on phallic-oriented masculinity and been connected to issues of patriarchy and power. This...

Boris Arvatov's Art and Production is a classic of the early Soviet avant-garde. Now nearing a century since its first publication, it is a crucial intervention for those seeking to understand the social dynamic of art and revolution during the period. ...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780063316201Author Simon WuFormat HardbackPage Count 224Imprint CollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 295gDimensions(mm) 213mm * 145mm...

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...

This is the third book in the innovative TRACEY series on contemporary drawing. Drawing Ambiguity builds upon its predecessors, Drawing Now and Hyperdrawing, by proposing that a position of ambiguity, a lack of definition, is not only desirable within...

Pollock and After: The Critical Debate brings together key writings on debates about Abstract Expressionism and Modernist art history. It is an essential resource for understanding post-war American art and culture. The second edition has been fully...

Working Space affords a rare opportunity to view painting from the inside out, through the eyes of one of the world's most prominent abstract painters. Frank Stella describes his perception of other artists' work, as well as his own, in this handsomely...

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...

A beautifully illustrated book that explores William Blake's relationship with Europe against a backdrop of political turmoil. Responding to revolution and war in Europe, enslavement and exploitation in European colonies, and repression and reaction...

In this landmark text by one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze takes the paintings of Francis Bacon as his object of his study. The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art...

'Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right'.This extraordinary collection of 100 artists' manifestos from across the globe over the last 100 years brings together activists, post-colonialists, surrealists, socialists,...

A pioneering artist continues his visionary inquiry into hyperspace In this insightful book, which is a revisionist math history as well as a revisionist art history, Tony Robbin, well known for his innovative computer visualizations of hyperspace,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789493246294Author Ben SchwartzFormat PaperbackPage Count 432Imprint ValizPublisher ValizWeight(grams) 340gDimensions(mm) 180mm * 114mm * 33mm

This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a...

This is a cultural history of mathematics and art, from antiquity to the present. Mathematicians and artists have long been on a quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. Taking...

The Ashmolean Museum and the Albertina are collaborating on a two-part exhibition project that will examine anew the role and the significance of drawing in Raphael's career. The Ashmolean holds the greatest collection of Raphael drawings in the world,...

Norm and Form is the first volume of E.H. Gombrich's highly influential collected contributions to the study of Renaissance art and thought. Its 11 essays deal with some of the most fundamental questions of style, patronage, taste, working methods and...

Since its first appearance in 1931 Herbert Read's introduction to the understanding of art has established itself as a classic of its kind. It provides a basis for the appreciation of paintings, sculpture and art-objects of all periods by defining the...

The Short Story of Modern Art explains the how, why and when of modern art - who introduced certain things, what they were, where they were produced, and why they matter. Simply constructed, the book explores 50 key works - from the realist painting...

A timeline of artistic endeavour from the formal resources of the past to the boom-and-bust media hype of a postmodern age.In these celebrated essays Robert Hughes explores the lives and works of more than 80 artists, from Hans Holbein to Andy Warhol and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783960987727Author Gottfried BoehmFormat PaperbackPage Count 72Imprint Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther KonigPublisher Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther...

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...

Dominic McIver Lopes articulates and defends a 'buck passing theory of art', namely that a work of art is nothing but a work in one of the arts. Having traced philosophical interest in theories of art to a reaction to certain puzzle cases of avant-garde...

The novelist Elizabeth Bowen believed that media was a personal and social force. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she took an active role in the media and radio in particular by writing essays for radio broadcast, improvising interviews on the air and...

An entertaining and lively guide to rediscovering the pleasure in art"Ben Street is one of the greatest communicators and writers on art. [This is] an expert guide to looking at and understanding art. Beautifully put together and brilliantly written...

A renowned art historian confronts the specific powers of painting, and the hold of the visual image on the viewer's imagination Why do we find ourselves returning to certain pictures time and again? What is it we are looking for? How does our...

The avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism continue to have a huge influence on cultural practice, especially in contemporary art, with its obsession with sexuality, fetishism, and shock tactics. In this new treatment of the subject, Hopkins...

In 2012, Thomas Gardner and Salome Voegelin hosted a colloquium, entitled "Music - Sound Art: Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures", at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. This colloquium dealt with the current...

A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century No work of philosopher and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, "The...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781840686876Author Salvador DaliFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint Creation BooksPublisher Creation Books

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to...