It is the very question that Nigel Warburton demystifies in this brilliant and accessible little book. With the help of varied illustrations and photographs, from C�zanne and Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, best-selling author Warburton brings a philosopher's eye to art in a refreshing jargon-free style.With customary clarity, he explains art theories, that are much discussed but little understood, by thinkers such as Clive Bell, R.G Collingwood and Wittgenstein. He illuminates other perplexing problems in art, such as the artist's intention, representation and emotion. Drawing on photographs of Cindy Sherman and Tiananmen Square, Warburton shows that, if we are ever to answer the art question, we must consider each work of art on its own terms.A stimulating and handy guide through the art maze, The Art Question is essential reading for anyone interested in art, philosophy or those who simply like looking at and thinking about pictures.

    Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book By Artists and Critics is a collection of texts from letters, manifestos, notes and interviews. Sources include, as the title says, artists and critics—some expected, like van Gogh, Gauguin, Apollinaire, Mondrian, Greenberg, just to name a few—and some less so: Trotsky and Hitler, in the section on Art and Politics. The book is a wonderful resource and insight into the way artists think and work.

    These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.

    George Kubler draws upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics and replaces the notion of style with the idea of a linked succession of works distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same action. The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the ecstatic concept of style--the usual basis for conventional histories of art.

    These influential essays, interviews, and critical and theoretical comments provide bold and fertile insights into the construction of visual knowledge. Featuring a wide range of leading and emerging artists since 1945, the collection—while comprehensive and authoritative—offers the reader some eclectic surprises as well.Included here are texts that have become pivotal documents in contemporary art, along with writings that cover unfamiliar ground. Some are newly translated, others have never before been published. Together they address visual literacy, cultural studies, and the theoretical debates regarding modernism and postmodernism. The full panoply of visual media is represented, from painting and sculpture to environments, installations, performance, conceptual art, video, photography, and virtual reality. Thematic concerns range from figuration and process to popular culture, art and technology, and politics and the media. Contemporary issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality are also addressed.Kristine Stiles's general introduction is a succinct overview of artists' theories in the evolution of contemporary discourse around art. Introductions to each chapter provide synopses of the cultural contexts in which the texts originated and brief biographies of individual artists. The text is augmented by outstanding photographs, many of artists in their studios, and vivid, contemporary art images.Reflecting the editors' shared belief that artists' own theories provide unparalleled access to visual knowledge, this book, like its distinguished predecessors, Hershel Chipp's Theories of Modern Art (with Peter Selz and Joshua Taylor) and Joshua Taylor's Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in contemporary art."In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote 'in advance of the broken arm.' It was around that time that the word 'readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation."—Marcel Duchamp (1961)"Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional objects women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery. When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes find a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol about the relationships between men and women."—Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer (1978)"I want to create a fusion of art and life, Asia and America, Duchampiana modernism and Levi-Straussian savagism, cool form and hot video, dealing with all of those complex problems, spanning the tribal memory of the Nomadic Asians who crossed over the Bering Strait over 10,000 years ago."—Shigeko Kubota (1976)"Black for me is a lot more peaceful and gentle than white. White marble may be very beautiful, but you can't read anything on it. I wanted something that would be soft on the eyes, and turn into a mirror if you polished it. The point is to see yourself reflected in the names. Also the mirror image doubles and triples the space."—Maya Lin (1983)"Artists often depend on the manipulation of symbols to present ideas and associations not always apparent in such symbols. If all such ideas and associations were evident there would be little need for artists to give expression to them. In short, there would be no need to make art."—Andres Serrano (1989)

    She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.

    

    Starting on the streets of New York with simple fly-posters, she has gone on to disseminate her truisms, slogans, memorials and poems through a variety of media. They are enunciated by an unstable register of personae, be it ad-man, stand-up comedian, torturer, victim or evangelist. The sites for her work range from T-shirts and golf balls to dazzling electronic signboards at baseball stadiums.Her work uses language to investigate the nature of ideologies as conscious and unconscious formations about identity and experience. Her complex and poetic texts can be shocking, humorous and intriguing in content. At the same time she draws on Minimalism's use of industrial materials and deploys scale, movement and light to create art of great formal power and beauty.In the Survey, art critic and academic David Joselit surveys Holzer's changing oeuvre, from the first appearance of the streetwise Truisms in the late 1970 to her large-scale installations in museums worldwide. Joan Simon, curator of Holzer's first solo US museum exhibition, discusses with the artist her use of language and its relationship to visual form. In the Focus, Slovenian cultural theorist and philosopher Renata Salecl takes an in-depth look at Holzer's Lustmord series, which was precipitated by the events in the former Yugoslavia and boldly addresses the atrocities committed in war. For the Artist's Choice, the artist's fragmented, unexpected language is mirrored in Samuel Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said, which the artist has chosen alongside extracts from Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. A text by the artist on her literary influences accompanies a selection of her signature texts in the Artist's Writings section.

    Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be. The Art of Art History is a unique guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen, and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi's introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field.Contents:Art history : making the visible legible by Donald PreziosiReflections on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture by Johann Joachim WinckelmannWinckelmann divided : mourning the death of art history by Whitney DavisPatterns of intention by Michael BaxandallWhat is enlightenment? ; The critique of judgement by Immanuel KantPhilosophy of fine art by G.W.F. HegelPrinciples of art history by Heinrich Wölfflin"Form," nineteenth-century metaphysics, and the problem of art historical description by David SummersStyle by Meyer SchapiroStyle by Ernst GombrichLeading characteristics of the late Roman "Kunstwollen" by Alois RieglImages from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America by Aby WarburgWarburg's concept of "Kulturwissenschaft" and its meaning for aesthetics by Edgar WindRetrieving Warburg's tradition by Margaret IversenSemiotics and iconography by Hubert DamischSemiotics and art history : a discussion of context and senders by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson"Et in Arcadia ego" : Poussin and the elegiac tradition by E. PanofskyToward a theory of reading in the visual arts : Poussin's "The Arcadian shepherds" by Louis MarinSculpture in the expanded field by Rosalind KraussWhat is an author? by Michel FoucaultThe allegorical impulse : toward a theory of postmodernism by Craig OwensMapping the postmodern by Andreas HuyssenThe art historical canon : sins of omission by Nanette SalomonSexuality andbyin representation : five British artists by Lisa TicknerNo essential femininity by Mary Kelly and Paul SmithPostfeminism, feminist pleasures, and embodied theories of art by Amelia JonesThe temptation of new perspectives by Stephen MelvilleThe origin of the work of art by Martin HeideggerThe still life as a personal object : a note on Heidegger and van Gogh by Meyer SchapiroRestitutions of the truth in pointing ["pointure"] by Jacques DerridaOrientalism and the exhibitionary order by Timothy MitchellThe art museum as ritual by Carol DuncanInventing the "postcolonial" : hybridity and constituency in contemporary curating by Annie E. CoombesRemaking passports : visual thought in the debate on multiculturalism by Néstor García CancliniThe art of art history by Donald Preziosi

    First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has."Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.

    Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.

    Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaces them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times. Reflections the companion volume to this book, is also available as a Schocken paperback.Unpacking My Library, 1931The Task of the Translator, 1913The Storyteller, 1936Franz Kafka, 1934Some Reflections on Kafka, 1938What Is Epic Theater?, 1939On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939The Image of Proust, 1929The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Theses on the Philosophy of History, written 1940, pub. 1950

    In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

    Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called ”Texticles,” the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy (”Eros, c’est la vie” or “arouser la vie”—“drink it up”; “celebrate life”). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century’s most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.

    While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Whitney Chadwick's survey reexamines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender. In her discussion of feminism and its influence on such a reappraisal, the author also addresses the closely related issues of ethnicity, class, and sexuality.This expanded edition incorporates recent developments in contemporary art. Chadwick addresses the turn toward autobiography in much recent women's art. She considers issues such as the personal versus the political and the private versus the public, and analyzes the differences between women's art today and the seminal feminist work of the 1970s and 1980s.