Banksy's Bristol: Home Sweet Home


Steve Wright - 2007
    The images were taken when Banksy joined Bristol's radical football team The Easton Cowboys on a tour of Mexico to play football against the Zapatista freedom fighters. The new edition also contains sections on the Banksy vs Bristol Museum show, Exit Through The Gift Shop, The Tesco Value Petrol Bomb, an interview with John Nation and more. The book is a celebration of Banksy's street art in his home city of Bristol and places him in the context of 3D, John Nation from the Barton Hill Youth Club, Inkie, Nick Walker and the other artists and musicians who were instrumental in linking Bristol to the original New York hip-hop scene. It is the most revealing account of Banksy's formative years and contains more than one hundred images of his Bristol art, as well as pictures of Banksy at work, many of which have never been published before. Steve Wright, traces Banksy's roots back to the rave culture of the Nineties and draws a rounded picture of an artist who is most famous for being anonymous.

Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past


Simon Reynolds - 2010
    Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume


Mandy Aftel - 2001
    Renowned perfumer Mandy Aftel explores the primal nature and fundamental importance of aroma in everyday life, teaching people about the nature of smell and the idea of "olfactory consciousness" in Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume.

I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Forger


Frank Wynne - 2006
    During van Meegeren’s heyday as a forger of Vermeers, he earned 50 million dollars, the acclamation of the world’s press, and the satisfaction of swindling the Nazis. His canvases were so nearly authentic that they would almost certainly be prized among the catalogue of Vermeers if he had not confessed. And, no doubt, he never would have confessed at all if he hadn’t been trapped in a catch-22: he had thrived so noticably during the war that when it ended, he was quickly arrested as a Nazi collaborator. His only defense was to admit that he himself had painted the remarkable “Vermeers” that had passed through his hands—a confession the public refused to believe, until, in a huge media event, the courts staged the public painting of what would be van Meegeren’s last “Vermeer.” I Was Vermeer is an utterly gripping real-life mystery, capturing both the life of the consummate art forger, phenomenally skilled and yet necessarily unrecognized, and the equally fascinating work of the experts who identify forgeries and track down their perpetrators. Wry, amoral, irreverent, and plotted like a thriller, it is the first major book in forty years on this astonishing episode in history.

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures


Eric R. Kandel - 2016
    Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism―the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components―has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. He draws on his Nobel Prize-winning work revealing the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory in sea slugs to shed light on the complex workings of the mental processes of higher animals.In Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Kandel shows how this radically reductionist approach, applied to the most complex puzzle of our time―the brain―has been employed by modern artists who distill their subjective world into color, form, and light. Kandel demonstrates through bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive functions how science can explore the complexities of human perception and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art. At the heart of the book is an elegant elucidation of the contribution of reductionism to the evolution of modern art and its role in a monumental shift in artistic perspective. Reductionism steered the transition from figurative art to the first explorations of abstract art reflected in the works of Turner, Monet, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Mondrian. Kandel explains how, in the postwar era, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Louis, Turrell, and Flavin used a reductionist approach to arrive at their abstract expressionism and how Katz, Warhol, Close, and Sandback built upon the advances of the New York School to reimagine figurative and minimal art. Featuring captivating drawings of the brain alongside full-color reproductions of modern art masterpieces, this book draws out the common concerns of science and art and how they illuminate each other.

Listen


Joseph Kerman - 1972
    "Listen" makes music approachable by placing it in its cultural context with lavish illustrations, timelines, and maps. Equipped with a free Study Guide CD-ROM, the new edition is more accessible than ever, offering additional help in focused listening and in music fundamentals.

Alexander McQueen: Genius of a Generation


Kristin Knox - 2010
    He was a major fashion figure, famous throughout the world, especially the US (where he is a celebrity-favourite with clients including Sarah Jessica Parker, Penelope Cruz and Nicole Kidman) and Japan. McQueen's dramatic designs, also been worn by celebrities including Bjork, Lady Gaga and Rihanna, met with critical acclaim and earned him the British Designer of the Year award four times. This book is a must-have for fashion lovers everywhere.

The Portfolios of Ansel Adams


Ansel Adams - 1977
    A classic collection of the acclaimed photographer's limited edition portfolios, now available in a gorgeous trade paperback edition.

From Bauhaus to Our House


Tom Wolfe - 1981
    The strange saga of American architecture in the twentieth century makes for both high comedy and intellectual excitement as Wolfe debunks the European gods of modern and postmodern architecture and their American counterparts.

Blackstock's Collections: The Drawings of an Artistic Savant


Gregory L. Blackstock - 2006
    How much can a curious mind take in? And what can it do with all the data? Gregory L. Blackstock, a retired Seattle pot washer, draws order out of all the chaos with a pencil, a black marker, and some crayons.Blackstock is autistic and an artistic savant. He creates visual lists of everything from wasps to hats to emergency vehicles to noisemakers. In the spirit of the Outsider art of Henry Darger and Howard Finster, Blackstock makes art that is stirring in its profusion and detail and inspiring in its simple beauty. He has never received formal artistic training, yet his renderings clearly and beguilingly show subtle differences and similaritiesenabling the viewer to see, for example, the distinctive features of a dolly varden, a Pacific Coast steelhead cutthroat, and fourteen other types of trout.Each collection is lovingly captioned in Blackstock's unique hand with texts that reflect facts from his research as well as his passions and preferences. Blackstock's Collections contains over 100 extraordinary examples of his splendidly original taxonomy, offering a unique look inside the mind of a man making sense of life through art.Monsters of the Deep Major Forestry Pests The Great Cabbage Family The Spatulas The World War II U.S. Bombers The Buoys King Sized Jails Monsters of the Past Classical Clowns Great Italian Roosters Our State Lighthouses The Irish Joys

J.M.W. Turner, 1775 - 1851: The World of Light and Colour


Michael Bockemühl - 1991
    John Ruskin, the uncompromising nineteenth century defender of the painting of William Turner (1775-1851) spoke of the 'innocence of the eye', which perceives the colors and forms of the world before it recognizes their significance. But in order to develop such a style, Turner first had to overcome the entire legacy of late rococo academic teachings. He was simultaneously a romantic and a realist - and yet he was neither. His landscapes, far in advance of their time, have been called forerunners of Impressionism, but they also posses traits that influenced Expressionism, and many of his late compositions are thoroughly surrealistic.

Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art


Heinrich Wölfflin - 1923
    Examining such factors as style, quality, and mode of representation in terms of five opposed dynamisms (the linear vs. painterly, plane vs. recession, closed vs. open form, multiplicity vs. unity, and clearness vs. unclearness), the author analyzes the work of 64 major artists, delving even into sculpture and architecture. 150 illustrations of the work of Botticelli, van Cleve, Durer, Holbein, Brueghel, Bouts, Hals, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Titian, Vermeer, and other major figures accompany Professor Wölfflin's brilliant contributions to the methodology of art criticism.Whether you teach art, study it, or want to understand it purely for your own enjoyment, this epoch-making study will certainly increase your comprehension of and pleasure in the world's art heritage.

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry


Walter Pater - 1873
    Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would not call me a hedonist, it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek.'.The book had begun as a series of idiosyncratic, impressionistic critical essays on those artists that embodied for him the spirit of the Renaissance; by collecting them and adding his infamous Conclusion, Pater gained a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. But The Renaissance survives as one of the most innovative pieces of cultural criticism to emerge from the nineteenth century.

This Is Not a Pipe


Michel Foucault - 1968
    Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.

The Theatre: A Concise History


Phyllis Hartnoll - 1968
    He surveys new trends in theatre, including performance art, mixed-media stagings, multi-cultural theatre, feminism and theatre, dance theatre and ethnic drama, with a wealth of new illustrations and up-to-date reference material.