Criticism & Theory

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the...

An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery-a prolific poet and art critic-pairing poetry and art writings with playlists of music from his personal library. This book places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later...

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that "seeing is believing."Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop,...

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even...

A wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the place and power of colour in life and art by John Gage, author of the award-winning Colour and Culture. The complex phenomenon of colour has received detailed attention from the perspectives of physics,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156577168Author Max DoernerFormat PaperbackPage Count 435Imprint Harcourt Brace InternationalPublisher Harcourt Brace InternationalWeight(grams)...

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...

Design thinking is the core creative process for any designer; this book explores and explains this apparently mysterious design ability. This new edition is a completely revised, updated and extended version of a classic text. Focusing on what...

The authenticity of art has always commanded the attention of experts, dealers, collectors and the art-minded public - especially those who relish the Robin Hoods of art forgery who deceive rich collectors and pompous experts. This book os essays, edited...

Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of...

Fully updated and revised, this seminal book explains and illustrates what photographs are, how they were made and used in the past and, more particularly, what their place is in the creative arts and visual communications world of today. Paul Hill looks...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783906915487Author Sara HarrisonFormat PaperbackPage Count 496Imprint Hauser & WirthPublisher Hauser & WirthWeight(grams) 926g

The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance...

These interlocking essays uncover art as an active force in the world - neither elitist or remote, present to those who want it, affecting even those who don't. Winterson's own passionate vision of art is presented here, provocatively and personally, in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780865476394Author Rainer RilkeFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint North Point PressPublisher North Point PressWeight(grams) 68gDimensions(mm) 203mm *...

Over thousands of years, the art of Chinese painting has evolved, while also staying loyal to its traditional roots. Despite various schools of thought, styles and techniques, three primary categories have emerged across the discipline: landscape, figure...

This book presents the first comprehensive study of the philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind's critique of modern art. The first student of Erwin Panofsky, and a close associate of Aby Warburg, Edgar Wind was unusual among the 'Warburgians' for his...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780854882861Author Barbara Rodriguez MunozFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Whitechapel GalleryPublisher Whitechapel GalleryWeight(grams) 560g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781642641677Author Jonathan BowdenFormat PaperbackPage Count 206Imprint Counter-Currents PublishingPublisher Counter-Currents PublishingWeight(grams) 308g

This title includes an introduction by Martin Pawley. This book presents for the first time in English an array of essays on design by the seminal media critic and philosopher Vilem Flusser. It puts forward the view that our future depends on design. In...

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)...

Available in paperback for the first time, Professor Gombrich's highly-acclaimed last book offers a revealing insight into the history and psychology of taste. The Preference for the Primitive is a study of the idea that older and less sophisticated...

Slow Looking can lead to unexpected and huge rewards. In Book One - Learning to Look Robert Cumming shares his own slow discovery of the pleasures of looking and aesthetic experience, and in so doing encourages you to explore art through your own eyes...

Are your students baffled by Baudrillard? Dazed by Deleuze? Confused by Kristeva? Other beginners' guides can feel as impenetrable as the original texts to students who 'think in images'. "Contemporary Thinkers Reframed" instead uses the language of the...

Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public? Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today's multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783943365306Author Kirsty BellFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint Sternberg PressPublisher Sternberg PressWeight(grams) 947gDimensions(mm) 231mm * 177mm *...

This is a history of one of the central organizing principles in all schools and periods of art. It traces the evolution of the conception and the depiction of space in European and American painting and the ways in which this evolution reflects...

Colour is a given of most people's everyday lives, but at the same time it lies at the limits of language and understanding. David Batchelor's previous book for Reaktion, Chromophobia, addressed the extremes of love and loathing that colour has provoked...

In The Book of Circles, his companion volume to the popular Book of Trees, Manuel Lima takes us on a lively tour through millenia of information design. Three hundred detailed and colourful illustrations cover an encyclopedic array of subjects, drawing...

Joseph Beuys' work continues to influence and inspire practitioners and thinkers all over the world, in areas from organizational learning, direct democracy and new money forms to new art pedagogies and ecological art practices. Here, in dialogue with...

A groundbreaking, award-winning analysis of colour in Western culture, from the ancient Greeks to the late twentieth century by one of the most foremost authors on the subject. What does the language of colour tell us? Where does one colour begin and...

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...

A beautiful and elegant collection, with gorgeous full-color art reproductions, Looking at Pictures presents a little-known side of the eccentric Swiss genius: his great writings on art. His essays consider Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Cranach, Watteau,...

A groundbreaking and extensively researched account of the 1960s London art scene In the 1960s, London became a vibrant hub of artistic production. Postwar reconstruction, jet air travel, television arts programs, new color supplements, a generation of...

When the original edition of this book was published, John Russell hailed it as a 'massive contribution to our knowledge of one of the most fascinating and mysterious episodes in the history of modern art.' It still remains the most compact, accurate and...

Art honours the world, and criticism honours art, even - perhaps especially - when the critic sets out to destroy. The bad review is hardly ever written out of mere spite. In most cases, the motivation is disappointed idealism. Critics are people who...

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color blue throughout the agesBlue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now cite it...

This anthology, the first of its kind, presents thirty-two texts on contemporary prints and printmaking written from the mid-1980s to the present by authors from across the world. The texts range from history and criticism to creative writing. More than...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Named one of The Art Book's Best Books of the Decade (March 2003). 2003.Book InformationISBN 9780262720410Author Anthony VidlerFormat PaperbackPage Count...

A wide-ranging examination of Socialist Realism that shows it extended far beyond Eastern Europe.Was Socialist Realism Global? takes up a question that was posed by art historian Piotr Piotrowski in his final book. It offers new perspectives both on...