Here is a book that captures a valuable chapter in the history of modern art, as well as the spirit of one of its greatest advocates. 13 photos.

    music explosion of the late '70s through the '90s with groups like Joy Division (soon to be the subject of an Anton Corbijn movie), New Order, and Happy Mondays leading the New Wave. At Factory, musicians and designers commingled creatively, with innovators such as Peter Saville, Den Kelly, Mark Farrow, 8VO, and Barbara Kruger elevating album covers to a new art form. The label broke further ground when it opened its own disco, the legendary Hacienda. Factory Records is the ultimate and only collection of Factory's complete graphic output, including every single piece it produced: extremely rare record sleeves, club flyers, and posters all gathered together for the first time. A must for collectors and enthusiasts, Matthew Robertson's meticulous compilation of underground ephemera is poised to introduce a new generation of music and design fans to the creative genius of Factory.

    Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that documents approximately 50 of the artist's ephemeral time- and media-based works from throughout her career. The book also discusses a unique element of the Museum's retrospective, live performance: a new work created for the occasion, and performed by Abramovic herself; and re-creations of the artist's works by other performers-the first such to be undertaken in a museum setting. The book spans over four decades of Abramovic's early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances made with the Dutch artist Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of Media and performance art at MoMA, and four distinguished scholars examine Abramovic's ideas of time, duration and the reperformance of performance art as a way to extend it into posterity. The Artist Is Present also includes a CD with audio commentary by the artist that guides the reader through the publication. The artist is present not only in the exhibition but also in the experience of the book.Born in Belgrade just after the end of the Second World War, Marina Abramovic was raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church (her great uncle was a Patriarch and a canonized saint in the Church) and left Yugoslavia in 1976, having already established herself as a performance artist, living in Amsterdam and eventually New York, where she presently lives.

    Un retrato de una artista, sobre todo una artista.(Portrait of an artist, always an artist, above all an artist.)

    For this stunningly beautiful book, Joni hand-wrote an exquisite selection of her own lyrics and poems and illustrated them with more than thirty of her original pictures. Handcrafted, signed, and numbered in Los Angeles, the existing copies of this labor of love have rarely been seen in the past half-century.      Now, during Joni’s seventy-fifth birthday year, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings will be widely available for the first time. In this faithfully reproduced edition, Joni’s best-loved lyrics and poems spill across the pages in her own elegant script. The lively, full-color drawings depict a superb array of landscapes, still lifes, portraits of friends, self-portraits, innovative abstractions, and more. All the artwork from the original book is included, along with several additional pictures that Joni drew of her friends from the same period. Finally, the refreshed volume features an original introduction written by Joni. Morning Glory on the Vine is a gorgeous and intimate keepsake and an invitation to explore anew the dazzling, visionary world of Joni Mitchell.

    "Vincent is not dead. He will never die. His love, his genius, the great beauty he has created will go on forever, enriching the world... He was a colossus... a great painter... a great philosopher... a martyr to his love of art. "Walking down the streets of Paris the young Vincent Van Gogh didn't feel like he belonged. Battling poverty, repeated heartbreak and familial obligation, Van Gogh was a man plagued by his own creative urge but with no outlet to express it. Until the day he picked up a paintbrush.Written with raw insight and emotion, follow the artist through his tormented life, struggling against critical discouragement and mental turmoil and bare witness to his creative journey from a struggling artist to one of the world's most celebrated artists.

    You'll learn that Michelangelo's body odor was so bad, his assistants couldn't stand working for him; that Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube; and Georgia O'Keeffe loved to paint in the nude. This is one art history lesson you'll never forget!

    And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that sifting through a countless array of colorful periodicals and catalogs makes criticism seem to slip even further from our grasp? In this pamphlet, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for these startling changes."In What Happened to Art Criticism?, art historian James Elkins sounds the alarm about the perilous state of that craft, which he believes is 'In worldwide crisis . . . dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism' even as more and more people are doing it. 'It's dying, but it's everywhere . . . massively produced, and massively ignored.' Those who pay attention to other sorts of criticism may recognize the problems Elkins describes: 'Local judgments are preferred to wider ones, and recently judgments themselves have even come to seem inappropriate. In their place critics proffer informal opinions or transitory thoughts, and they shy from strong commitments.' What he'd like to see more of: ambitious judgment, reflection about judgment itself, and 'criticism important enough to count as history, and vice versa.' Amen to that."—Jennifer Howard, Washington Post Book World

    Americans embraced these visions and incorporated fantasy into reality: mid-century fashion, popular music, eating and drinking, and even architecture were influenced by the Tiki trend. With unfettered enthusiasm—ignoring scholarly authenticity and political correctness—American artisans molded the Tiki into their own image, creating a mid-century pop culture genre that was forgotten until the 2000s, when urban archeologist Sven Kirsten wrested the figure of the Tiki from obscurity with his pioneering TASCHEN books The Book of Tiki and Tiki Modern. This book traces the development of Tiki as romantic vision and kitschy cultural appropriation, from its earliest beginnings when James Cook “discovered” the Pacific Islands in the second half of the 18th century to Herman Melville’s South Sea adventure stories like Moby Dick and Gauguin’s exuberant, exotic paintings to the jungle fantasies of the Hollywood dream factory. Published in connection with an exhibition at the prestigious Musée du quai Branly in Paris, Tiki Pop the culmination of Sven Kirsten’s research efforts. With his widely lauded visual style, the author places venerable ancient godheads next to their Polynesian pop counterparts. With hundreds of previously unpublished images, the story of Tiki the 20th-century pop icon unfolds from its earliest beginnings to its spectacular downfall in the dawning awareness of the Western world’s colonial misdeeds.

    The stylish design of this book, along with the interior photographs, illustrations and diagrams, make the learning process simple and fun for beginners, and provides useful tips for more advanced readers.With its great flexibility, acrylic paint can mimic the appearance of oils, tempera, and watercolors in unique ways, each method pictured in a separate step-by-step demonstration. The author also examines the use of acrylics with airbrush, sculptural, and printing techniques-even three-dimensional relief painting and collagraphy printing methods are included-and how several of these different creative processes can be integrated successfully in one composition with ink, pencil, charcoal, and pastel. Inspiring examples of representational and abstract subjects are depicted throughout, and a complete survey of all the latest acrylic materials covers the best paint brands, painting mediums, supports, varnishes, brushes, knives, and palettes.This book contains instructions on painting many different subjects, like landscapes, trees, mountains, buildings, still lifes, and portraits. It makes an ideal gift for someone practiced in the arts of acrylic painting, and newcomers to the art form.