The Location of Culture


Homi K. Bhabha - 1994
    In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.

Rules for Modern Life: A Connoisseur's Survival Guide


David Tang - 2016
    Around every corner lies a potential faux pas waiting to happen. But if you've ever struggled for the right response to an unwelcome gift or floundered for conversation at the dinner party from hell, fear not: help is at hand.In Rules for Modern Life, Sir David Tang, resident agony uncle at the Financial Times, delivers a satirical masterclass in navigating the social niceties of modern life. Whether you're unsure of the etiquette of doggy bags or wondering whether a massage room in your second home would be de trop, Sir David has the answer to all your social anxieties - and much more besides.

The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages


Arnold Hauser - 1951
    Volume 1 of this comprehensive social history of art takes the reader from prehistoric naturalism, art and magic, through the art of the orient, ancient Greece and Rome to the high art of the European middle ages.

Artspeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present


Robert Atkins - 1990
    Discusses the terms, movements, and major artists in the modern American and European art world.

The Shape of Content


Ben Shahn - 1957
    He talks of the creation of the work of art, the importance of the community, the problem of communication, and the critical theories governing the artist and his audience.

Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain


Dwight Macdonald - 1962
    He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

Noise: The Political Economy of Music


Jacques Attali - 1977
    . . . In its general theoretical argument on the relations of culture to economy, but also in its specialized concentration, Noise has much that is of importance to critical theory today.” SubStance“For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. The book’s title refers specifically to the reception of musics that sonically rival normative social orders. Noise is Attali’s metaphor for a broad, historical vanguardism, for the radical soundscapes of the western continuum that express structurally the course of social development.” EthnomusicologyJacques Attali is the author of numerous books, including Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order and Labyrinth in Culture and Society.

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin


Lawrence Weschler - 1982
    Traces the life and career of the California artist, who currently works with pure light and the subtle modulation of empty space.

Film as a Subversive Art


Amos Vogel - 1974
    According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored." So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, "Film as a Subversive Art" analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema


Carolina Hein - 2006
    These changes can be seen in every field of life. For instance, the way of supplying basic needs or the way how to make own life better, but also certain norms and values are quite different today. Instead of visiting a theatre in order to be entertained, people can watch TV or use the internet. If a man and a woman live together unmarried, hardly anybody will be shocked about that fact. But often certain attitudes are anchored in society and can hardly be changed. One example is the determination which individual role men and women are likely to play as members of a society and how their image appears in every culture. It is especially interesting to see how the media represent women, the so called -weaker sex-. The following pages respond with the representation of women through the years. Additionally, they deal with problems and consequences coming up because of the difference between men and women.

The Art of Noise (futurist manifesto, 1913)


Luigi Russolo - 1913
    Russolo calls for an infinite expansion of musical vocabulary and sensibility in coordination with that of industrial machinery—“We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds”—envisioning a machine-based music that would dispense entirely with inherited forms. This publication made the text widely available in English for the first time. Also included is a description of the “First Concert of Futurist Noise Instruments” in Modena, Italy on June 2, 1913.

What Is Art And 100 Other Very Important Questions


Ernst Billgren - 2008
    

Poetry, Language, Thought


Martin Heidegger - 1971
    Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opens up appreciation of Heidegger beyond the study of philosophy to the reaches of poetry and our fundamental relationship to the world. Featuring "The Origin of the Work of Art," a milestone in Heidegger's canon, this enduring volume provides potent, accessible entry to one of the most brilliant thinkers of modern times.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity


Marshall Berman - 1982
    In this unparalleled book, Marshall Berman takes account of the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and the impact of modernism on art, literature and architecture. This new edition contains an updated preface addressing the critical role the onset of modernism played in popular democratic upheavals in the late 1920s.

E-Flux Journal - The Internet Does Not Exist


Julieta Aranda - 2015