In April 2011, he was arrested and held for more than two months in terrible conditions. The most famous living Chinese artist and activist, Weiwei is a figure of extraordinary talent, courage, and integrity. From the beginning of his career, he has spoken out against the world's most powerful totalitarian regime, in part by creating some of the most beautiful and mysterious artworks of our age, works which have touched millions around the world.Just after Ai Weiwei's release from illegal detention, Barnaby Martin flew to Beijing to interview him about his imprisonment and to learn more about what is really going on behind the scenes in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. Based on these interviews and Martin's own intimate connections with China, Hanging Man is an exploration of Weiwei's life, art, and activism and also a meditation on the creative process, and on the history of art in modern China. It is a rich picture of the man and his milieu, of what he is trying to communicate with his art, and of the growing campaign for democracy and accountability in China. It is a book about courage and hope found in the absence of freedom and justice.

     You don’t want to come to your final moments regretting your un-lived dreams. You’ve got paintings inside you waiting to be expressed. You know that, while you could keep repeating what’s worked before in your art, this is a kind of soul death. You want to experiment, take risks and explore a deeper self expression. You want to wrestle down your self doubts and inner criticism and finally create the paintings of your dreams- paintings that wow and astonish you. You want to express YOU in your art. You don't want to play it safe anymore. The worst thing you could do as an artist is to not experiment. Art is about exploring wonder and the unknown, the terra incognita of the soul.Painting is a mirror. It brings up everything, especially fear and yearning. Are you an artist tired of feeling blocked from expressing onto the canvas the art that lives deep within you? Slay self doubt and say YES to your artist's journey. Overcome your fears to live your deepest life. Explore, experiment and create the art of your dreams on your inner journey of creation and self expression. Paint with confidence and finally express YOU in your art.The Artist's Journey written by artist, author and Stanford trained existential psychiatrist Nancy Hillis, M.D. is an inspirational exhortation with psychological and philosophical underpinnings, to move you closer and closer to your deepest self expression in your art and life. If you want a comprehensive, clearly explained, psychologically sophisticated map and self-help guidebook for your creative self-expression, start here with The Artist's Journey.  Start your journey of self expression today. Scroll up and click BUY NOW.

    Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

    Culture is a garden to be cultivated."Many bemoan the decay of culture. But we all have a responsibility to care for culture, to nurture it in ways that help people thrive. In Culture Care artist Makoto Fujimura issues a call to cultural stewardship, in which we become generative and feed our culture's soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity. We serve others as cultural custodians of the future.This is a book for artists, but artists come in many forms. Anyone with a calling to create—from visual artists, musicians, writers, and actors to entrepreneurs, pastors, and business professionals—will resonate with its message. This book is for anyone with a desire or an artistic gift to reach across boundaries with understanding, reconciliation, and healing. It is a book for anyone with a passion for the arts, for supporters of the arts, and for "creative catalysts" who understand how much the culture we all share affects human thriving today and shapes the generations to come.

    Not only have traditional forms of art such as printing, painting, photography and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques and media, but entirely new forms such as net art, software art, digital installation and virtual reality have emerged as recognized artistic practices, collected by major museums, institutions and private collectors the world over. Here Christiane Paul surveys the developments in digital art from its appearance in the early 1990s right up to the present day, and looks ahead to what the future may hold. Drawing a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art, she discusses all the key artists and works. The book explores themes addressed and raised by the art, such as viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks and telepresence, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation and preservation of digital art, the virtual museum, and ownership and copyright.

    Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue... It is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.'Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays , chiefly about French artists, for a variety of journals and magazines. Gathering them for this book, he realised that he had unwittingly been retracing the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism.

    This classic textbook examines the artistic movements and achievements of that time.

    Today's works of art may have no obvious focal point. Traditional artistic media no longer do what we expect of them. The styles and movements that characterized art production prior to the twenty-first century no longer exist.This book provides a straightforward guide to understanding contemporary art based on the concept of the tabula rasa – a clean slate and a fresh mind. Ossian Ward presents a six-step program that gives readers new ways of looking at some of the most challenging art being produced today. Since artists increasingly work across traditional media and genres, Ward has developed an alternative classification system for contemporary practice such as 'Art as Entertainment', 'Art as Confrontation', 'Art as Joke' -- categories that help to make sense of otherwise obscure-seeming works. There are also 20 'Spotlight' features which guide readers through encounters with key works.Ultimately, the message is that any encounter with a challenging work of contemporary art need not be intimidating or alienating but rather a dramatic, sensually rewarding, and thought-provoking experience.

    A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The short quotations presented here have been carefully selected from articles, tweets, and interviews given by this acclaimed Chinese artist and activist. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections.Together, these quotes span some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei's eventful career--from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011--providing a window into the mind of one of the world's most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists.Select Quotes from the Book:On Freedom of ExpressionSay what you need to say plainly, and then take responsibility for it.A small act is worth a million thoughts.Liberty is about our rights to question everything.On Art and ActivismEverything is art. Everything is politics.The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don't feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy.On Government, Power, and Making Moral ChoiceOnce you've tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country.I feel powerless all the time, but I regain my energy by making a very small difference that won't cost me much.Tips on surviving the regime: Respect yourself and speak for others. Do one small thing every day to prove the existence of justice.On the Digital WorldOnly with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what's on his mind. A fairy tale has come true.The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It's as simple as that.The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China.On History, the Historical Moment, and the FutureIf a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.We need to get out of the old language.The world is a sphere, there is no East or West.Personal ReflectionI've never planned any part of my career--except being an artist. And I was pushed into that corner because I thought being an artist was the only way to have a little freedom.Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom.Expressing oneself is like a drug. I'm so addicted to it.

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

    In a richly anecdotal chronological narrative he describes the rise and occasional fall of the extraordinary men and women who over the centuries have made it their business to sell art to kings, merchants, nobles, entrepreneurs, and museums. From its beginnings in Antwerp, where paintings were sometimes sold by weight, to the rich hauteur of the contemporary gallery in New York, Paris, and London, art dealing has, he shows, been about identifying what is intangible but infinitely desirable, and then finding clients for whom it is irresistible. Those who have purveyed art for a living range from tailors, spies, and the occasional anarchist to scholars, aristocrats, merchants, and connoisseurs, each variously motivated by greed, belief in their own vision of art and its history, or simply the will to win. Philip Hook’s history is one of human folly, and greed—yet ingenuity and heroism. Rogues’ Gallery is learned, witty, and irresistibly readable.

    Art as Therapy is packed with 150 examples of outstanding art, with chapters on Love, Nature, Money, and Politics outlining how these works can help with common difficulties. For example, Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter helps us focus on what we want to be loved for; Serra's Fernando Passoa reminds us of the importance of dignity in suffering; and Manet's Bunch of Asparagus teaches us how to preserve and value our long-term partners.De Botton demonstrates how art can guide and console us, and along the way, help us to better understand both art and ourselves.

    Presenting 48 joints, selected from among the several hundred known and used today, this visually exciting book will please anyone who has ever been moved by the sheer beauty of wood. With the clear isometric projections complementing the 64 pages of stunning photographs, even the weekend carpenter can duplicate these bequests from the traditional Japanese carpenter, which can be applied to projects as large as the buildings for which most of them were originally devised or to projects as small as a sewing box.

    A talented violinist as well as a painter, Klee drew much of the inspiration for his abstract art from musical rhythms and structure. Like a composer, he developed and harmonized pictorial themes, weaving a complex series of signs and symbols into his painting. Art historian Hajo Duchting focuses his study primarily on Klee's decade-long tenure at the Bauhaus, where the artist's theories and practice first merged, and where he was to develop his Color Spectrum, Square and Polyphone painting series. Illustrated throughout with full-color reproductions of Klee's paintings and etchings, as well as entries from his diaries, this unique study sheds light on an important aspect of Klee's work while providing insights into his development as an abstract artist.

    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