Lebrecht compellingly demonstrates that classical recording has reached its end point, but this is not simply an expos? of decline and fall. It is, for the first time, the full story of a minor art form, analyzing the cultural revolution wrought by Schnabel, Toscanini, Callas, Rattle, the Three Tenors, and Charlotte Church. It is the story of how stars were made and broken by the record business; how a war criminal conspired with a concentration-camp victim to create a record empire; and how advancing technology, boardroom wars, public credulity and unscrupulous exploitation shaped the musical backdrop to our modern lives. The book ends with a suitable shrine to classical recording: the author's critical selection of the 100 most important recordings, and the 20 most appalling.Filled with memorable incidents and unforgettable personalities, from Goddard Lieberson, legendary head of CBS Masterworks who signed his letters as God; to Georg Solti, who turned the Chicago Symphony into the loudest symphony on earth - this is at once the captivating story of the life and death of classical recording and an opinionated, insider's guide to appreciating the genre, now and for years to come.

    The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise.Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

    The truth is, according to INTERPOL records, more than 20,000 stolen works of art are missing—including Rembrandts, Renoirs, van Goghs, and Picassos. Museum of the Missing offers an intriguing tour through the underworld of art theft, where the stakes are high and passions run strong. Not only is the volume beautifully written and lavishly illustrated—if all the paintings presented here could be gathered in one museum it would be one of the finest collections in existence—it tells a story as fascinating as any crime novel. This gripping page-turner features everything from wartime plundering to audacious modern-day heists, from an examination of the criminals’ motivations to a look at the professionals who spend their lives hunting down the wrongdoers. Most breathtaking of all, this invaluable resource offers a “Gallery of Missing Art,” an extensive section showcasing stolen paintings that remain lost—including information about the theft and estimated present-day value—and which may never be seen again.

    The essays collected in this book reflect some of the commitments and changes during the period that saw the women's movement shift into feminism and the development of feminism's involvement with the politics of representation, psychoanalytic film theory and avant-garde aesthetics.

    And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently targeted.In Stealing Rembrandts, art security expert Anthony M. Amore and award-winning investigative reporter Tom Mashberg reveal the actors behind the major Rembrandt heists in the last century. Through thefts around the world - from Stockholm to Boston, Worcester to Ohio - the authors track daring entries and escapes from the world's most renowned museums. There are robbers who coolly walk off with multimillion dollar paintings; self-styled art experts who fall in love with the Dutch master and desire to own his art at all costs; and international criminal masterminds who don't hesitate to resort to violence. They also show how museums are thwarted in their ability to pursue the thieves - even going so far as to conduct investigations on their own, far away from the maddening crowd of police intervention, sparing no expense to save the priceless masterpieces.Stealing Rembrandts is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind look at the black market of art theft, and how it compromises some of the greatest treasures the world has ever known.

    Originally published in 1989 and until now unavailable in any edition, Just Looking had become one of Updike's rarest and most sought-after titles. It collects the best of the novelist and critic's multifarious musings on art and artists, museums and popular culture, the lives behind the works and the ways in which these works have informed his own life. Included here are pieces on Vermeer, Erastus Field, Modigliani, the major Impressionists, New Yorker cartoonist Ralph Barton, children's book illustrations, Fairfield Porter, and Jean Ipousteguy, among others, as well as extensive reflections on John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth, a critical examination of writers' art, and a long essay on his impressions of the Museum of Modern Art. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this edition of Just Looking -- the first ever in paperback -- brings back into print a key work of art criticism by one of the most respected and accomplished writers of our time and is the first in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's new reprint series.

    Compiled by an international team of experts, each entry is given its complete range of interpretations - sexual and spiritual, official and subversive, cultural and religious - to bring meaning and insight to the symbol.

    This wide spread mood in literature had a major effect on 19th-century poets and painters, and the affinities between them and their 20th-centurycounterparts makes this account of the Romantic-Decadents an indispensible guide to the study of modern literature.

    5, 1948 sell for $140 million?            Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.            This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on  interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced  auction purchasers do not know.

    In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form, " in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded.

    

    What makes the Book of Kells such an extraordinary example of the illuminated manuscript? Why is Durer's self-portrait so iconic? How did Turner's Rain, Steam, Speed turn the art world on its head? What's so great about Jasper Johns's Flag? And who was Whistler's mother, anyway? Art history is filled with paintings that shocked, intrigued, enraged, and mystified their audiences--paintings that exemplified the period in which they were created and forever changed the way we think. Here, 100 examples of these icons of art are presented in beautiful, high-quality reproductions. Each spread features comparative illustrations and details as well as an engaging text that explains why that particular painting belongs in the pantheon of world-changing art.

    What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education.Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art.Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Samuel Beckett.

    This book ranges over the trial of Oscar Wilde, the public furore over prostitution and syphilis, moral outrage over the breakdown of the family, abortion rights and AIDS. High and low culture, from male quest romances to contemporary male bonding movies, Freud to Fatal Attraction, are all included in his study.

    Yet in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, daringly commissioned him to do just that.The resulting 1985 exhibition and book, In the American West, was a milestone in American photography and Avedon's most important body of work. His unflinching portraits of oilfield and slaughterhouse workers, miners, waitresses, drifters, mental patients, teenagers, and others captured the unknown and often-ignored people who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs. Making no apologies for shattering stereotypes of the West and Westerners, Avedon said, "I'm looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait. I'm looking for people who are surprising—heartbreaking—or beautiful in a terrifying way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as part of yourself."Photographer Laura Wilson worked with Avedon during the six years he was making In the American West. In Avedon at Work, she presents a unique photographic record of his creation of this masterwork—the first time a major photographer has been documented in great depth over an extended period of time. She combines images she made during the photographic sessions with entries from her journal to show Avedon's working methods, his choice of subjects, his creative process, and even his experiments and failures. Also included are a number of Avedon's finished portraits, as well as his own comments and letters from some of the subjects.Avedon at Work adds a new dimension to our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most significant series of portraits. For everyone interested in the creative process it confirms that, in Laura Wilson's words, "much as all these photographs may appear to be moments that just occurred, they are finally, in varying degrees, works of the imagination."