In his search for new friends and potential lovers, he becomes sucked into London’s gay drug culture, soon becoming addicted to partying and the phenomenon that is ‘chemsex’. Exploring his own journey through this dark but popular world, James looks at the motivating factors that led him to the culture, as well as examining the paths taken by others. He reveals the real goings-on at the weekends for thousands of people after most have gone to bed, and how modern technology allows them to arrange, congregate, furnish themselves with drugs and spend hours, often days, behind closed curtains, with strangers and in states of heightened sexual desire.Something for the Weekend looks compassionately at a growing culture that’s now moved beyond London and established itself as more than a short-term craze.

    From the explosions of image and color in In The Shadow of the Sun, The Last of England, The Garden and Wittgenstein, to the somber blacks of his collages and tar paintings, Jarman has consistently used color in unprecedented ways, making his ideas on the subject of interest to filmmakers, film audiences, artists and students alike. Blue, his most personal and innovative film, consists of a compelling soundtrack accompanied by a monochrome blue image and is, among other things, a comment on Jarman's diminishing eyesight due to AIDS. In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classical theory, anecdote, and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams. He explains the use of color in Medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists and draws on the great color theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. He writes too about the meanings of color in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion and alchemy. Read either as a work on color, or a distillation of Jarman's artistic vision, Chroma presents an exciting perspective on the subject.

    Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn't like the way they were depicted.

    Dani is befriended--against her own better judgment--by a young therapist named Grace Beaumont, who helps Dani make it through the ordeal of bringing the attacker to justice.

    Beginning with the self-portraits of nuns in medieval illuminated manuscripts, Borzello reconstructs an overlooked genre and provides essential contextual information. She moves on to sixteenth-century Italy, where Sofonisba Anguissola painted one of the longest known series of self-portraits, recording her features from adolescence to old age. In 1630, Artemisia Gentileschi depicted herself as the personification of painting, and at the same time in the Netherlands Judith Leyster portrayed herself at her easel, as a relaxed, self-assured professional. In the 1700s, women from Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun to Angelica Kauffman conveyed, each in her own way, ideas of femininity and the artist's passion for her chosen field. And in the nineteenth century, as the doors to art schools began to open to women, self-portraits by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Marie Bashkirtseff, and photographers such as Alice Austen resonated with a newfound self-confidence. Seeing Ourselves concludes with the breaking of taboos in the twentieth century. Paula Modersohn-Becker imagines herself pregnant in her fantasy nude of 1906; Alice Neel paints herself naked at the age of eighty; and Frida Kahlo explicitly renders her own physical pain in a self-portrait complete with nails piercing her skin. And in recent decades, Cindy Sherman explores identity by transforming herself over and over into a cast of different characters, posing the questions that all the women in this enthralling book have faced when "seeing" themselves.

    From them emerged the first major modern art dealer. It was 1947, and the art world would never be the same. From the early days on 57th Street, to the rise of SoHo in the 60s, to the emergence of Chelsea as the hotbed of art galleries, we see the meteoric rise and the devastating falls of the most renowned dealers: Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Arne Glimcher, and Iwan Wirth. With unparalleled access, the longtime Vanity Fair reporter tells us the story of contemporary art through the people who coddled, supported, and funded the likes of Jeff Koons, and Cy Twombly.It's a story of backstabbing, betrayals, fruitful partnerships, genius, and ever larger sums of money. The world of contemporary art is inextricable from the wild wealth and naked financial opportunism that surrounds it.

    After leaving his home in Bradford for the Royal College of Art in London, his career flourished, but he continued to struggle with a sense of not belonging, because of his homosexuality, which had yet to be decriminalized, and his inclination for a figurative style of art not sufficiently “contemporary” to be valued. Trips to New York and California—where he would live for many years and paint his iconic swimming pools—introduced him to new scenes and new loves, beginning a journey that would take him through the fraught years of the AIDS epidemic.   A compelling hybrid of novel and biography, Life of David Hockney offers an insightful overview of a painter whose art is as accessible as it is compelling, and whose passion to create has never been deterred by heartbreak or illness or loss.

    This intimate, critical biography chronicles Abramović's formative and until now undocumented years in Yugoslavia, and tells the story of her partnership with the German artist Ulay--one of the twentieth century's great examples of the fusion of artistic and private life.In one of many long-durational performances in the renewed solo career that followed, Abramović famously lived in a New York gallery for twelve days without eating or speaking, nourished only by prolonged eye contact with audience members. It was here, in 2002, that author James Westcott first encountered her, beginning an exceptionally close relation between biographer and subject. "When Marina Abramović Dies" draws on Westcott's personal observations of Abramović, his unprecedented access to her archive, and hundreds of hours of interviews he conducted with the artist and the people closest to her. The result is a unique and vivid portrait of the charismatic self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art.""

    Brando Unzipped is the definitive gossip guide to the late, great actor's life New York Daily News. Lurid, raunchy, perceptive, and certainly worth reading, it's one of the best show-biz biographies of the year. London's Sunday Times. Brando Unzipped received an Honorable Mention from Foreword Magazine in its Book of the Year competition, and it won a Silver Ippy award for Best Biography from the Independent Publisher's Association."

    Polymath and master interviewer Jonathan Cott first interviewed Maurice Sendak in 1976 for Rolling Stone, just at the time when Outside Over There, the concluding and by far the strangest volume of a trilogy that began with Where The Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, was gestating. Over the course of their wide-ranging and revelatory conversation about his life, work, and the fantasies and obsessions that drove his creative process, they focused on many of the themes and images that would appear in the new book five years later. Drawing on that interview,There's a Mystery There is a profound examination of the inner workings of a complicated genius's torments and inspirations that ranges over the entirety of his work and his formative life experiences, and uses Outside Over There, brilliantly and originally, as the key to understanding just what made this extravagantly talented man tick. To gain multiple perspectives on that intricate and multifaceted book, Cott also turns to four "companion guides": a Freudian analyst, a Jungian analyst, an art historian, and Sendak's great friend and admirer, the playwright Tony Kushner. The book is richly illustrated with examples from Sendak's work and other related images.

    Associating freely, they took a psychoanalytical perspective for a lengthy exploration of Abramovic’s biography and art and their interrelation. ​Abramovic went into this discussion in hopes of reaching a better understanding of herself, her personality, and her work. Conversations with artists are widely available, she notes, but a chance to use psychoanalysis to put an artist’s life and work in context is much rarer. The resulting book is neither a therapist’s report nor a Fischer’s analysis of Abramovic. Rather, it is a search for understanding conducted by the pair, looking for the structures and dynamics that underlie Abramovic’s life and art. The dialogues are presented along with Fischer’s comments on them and images of some of Abramovic’s performances that are referred to in the discussion.

    Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city--wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit--seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her--and our--lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Bjork, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

    History is a construction. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them a centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings?

    For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times

    Channeling "the primal vision of Hart Crane" (Harold Bloom), Adam Fitzgerald helped welcome the modernist aethetic into the twenty-first century. Part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide, Fitzgerald's chimerical poems confront "a surging ocean of sound and language" (Maureen McLane). In these forty-eight poems, he conducts a madcap symphony of language, memory, and fantasy with the "exhilarating assurance of nonstop invention" (Timothy Donnelly).