Criticism & Theory

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...

The use of perspective in Renaissance painting caused a revolution in the history of seeing, allowing artists to depict the world from a spectator's point of view. But the theory of perspective that changed the course of Western art originated...

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...

A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of printIn process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the...

The visual arts enrich our lives in many ways: bringing innovative ideas and the pleasures of beauty and emotion, but they can also confound. How To Understand Art sets out to enhance the viewer's experience by breaking down the elements of art and...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780486421674Author Arthur RackhamFormat PaperbackPage Count 64Imprint Dover Publications Inc.Publisher Dover Publications Inc.Weight(grams)...

What is modern art? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it worth so much damn money? Join Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from...

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...

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...

Visual Time offers a rare consideration of the idea of time in art history. Non-Western art histories currently have an unprecedented prominence in the discipline. To what extent are their artistic narratives commensurate with those told about Western...

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...

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project...

'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,...

Emphasizing the diversity of twentieth-century collage practices, Rona Cran's book explores the role that it played in the work of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan. For all four, collage was an important creative catalyst,...

At once engaging, personal, and analytical, this book provides the intellectual resources for the critical understanding of art Charles Harrison's landmark book offers an original, clear, and wide-ranging introduction to the arts of painting and...

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 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,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783959051392Author Dieter DanielsFormat PaperbackPage Count 152Imprint Spector BooksPublisher Spector BooksWeight(grams) 181gDimensions(mm) 175mm * 109mm *...

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of...

"Art" has always been contested terrain, whether the object in question is a medieval tapestry or Duchamp's Fountain. But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in...

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...

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...

Part manifesto, part artistic joke, Fillippo Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook is a provocative work about art disguised as an easy-to-read cookbook. Here are recipes for ice cream on the moon; candied atmospheric electricities; nocturnal love feasts;...

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...

Art in Theory (1648-1815) provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory...

Leo Steinberg's classic "Other Criteria" comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from "Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public" and the "flat-bed picture plane" to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and...

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...

Only 16% of the most recent Venice Biennale artists were female. A mere 14% of MoMA's 2016 display is by non-white artists. Only one third of artists represented by US galleries are female, but over two-thirds of the enrolment in art and art-history...

By taking simple ways of looking at sculpture, this book uncovers unexpected affinities between works of very different periods and types. From sundials to mirrors, from graves to way-markers, from fountains to contemporary art, a wide range of...

An unprecedented survey of artists in exile from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to Asian, Latin American, African American, and female artists This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of...

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

'Joyfully entertaining. Full of warmth, wisdom and affectionate delight in the wonder and absurdity of being human.' Observer'Funny, honest and heart-warming.' Matt HaigWhat better way to understand ourselves than through the eyes of comedians - those...

Taking aim at the mostly male bastion of art theory and criticism, Mira Schor brings a maverick perspective and provocative voice to the issues of contemporary painting, gender representation, and feminist art. Writing from her dual perspective of a...

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aisha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from...