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

    But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller and Mozart, he also believed that art was in terminal decline.To resolve this apparent paradox, as Michael Inwood explains in his incisive Introduction, we must understand the particular place of aesthetics in Hegel's vast intellectual edifice. Its central pillars consist of logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Art derives its value from offering a sensory vision of the God-like absolute, from its harmonious fusion of form and content, and from summing up the world-view of an age such as Homer's. While it scaled supreme heights in ancient Greece, Hegel doubted art's ability to encompass Christian belief or the reflective irony characteristic of modern societies. Many such challenging ideas are developed in this superb treatise; it counts among the most stimulating works of a master thinker.Table of ContentsIntroductory Lectures on Aesthetics Introduction A Note on the Translation and CommentaryINTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON AESTHETICSChapter I: The Range of Aesthetic Defined, and Some Objections against the Philosophy of Art Refuted[α Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Artβ Does Art merit Scientific Treatment?γ Is Scientific Treatment appropriate to Art?δ Answer to βε Answer to γ]Chapter II: Methods of Science Applicable to Beauty and Art[1. Empirical Method - Art-scholarship(a) Its Range(b) It generates Rules and Theories(c) The Rights of Genius2. Abstract Reflection3. The Philosophical Conception of Artistic Beauty, general notion of]Chapter III: The Conception of Artistic BeautyPart I - The Work of Art as Made and as Sensuous1. Work of Art as Product of Human Activity[(a) Conscious Production by Rule(b) Artistic Inspiration(c) Dignity of Production by Man(d) Man's Need to produce Works of Art]2. Work of Art as addressed to Man's Sense[(a) Object of Art - Pleasant Feeling?(b) Feeling of Beauty - Taste(c) Art-scholarship(d) Profounder Consequences of Sensuous Nature of Art(α) Relations of the Sensuous to the Mind(αα) Desire(ββ) Theory(γγ) Sensuous as Symbol of Spiritual(β) The Sensuous Element, how Present in the Artist(γ) The Content of Art Sensuous]Part II - The End of Art3. [The Interest or End of Art(a) Imitation of Nature?(α) Mere Repetition of Nature is -(αα) Superfluous(ββ) Imperfect(γγ) Amusing Merely as Sleight of Hand(β) What is Good to Imitate?(γ) Some Arts cannot be called Imitative(b) Humani nihil - ?(c) Mitigation of the Passions?(α) How Art mitigates the Passions(β) How Art purifies the Passions(αα) It must have a Worthy Content(ββ) But ought not to be Didactic(γγ) Nor explicitly addressed to a Moral Purpose(d) Art has its own Purpose as Revelation of Truth]Chapter IV: Historical Deducation of the True Idea of Art in Modern Philosophy1. Kant[(a) Pleasure in Beauty not Appetitive(b) Pleasure in Beauty Universal(c) The Beautiful in its Teleological Aspect(d) Delight in the Beautiful necessary though felt]2. Schiller, Winckelmann, Schelling3. The IronyChapter V: Division of the Subject[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence of Matter and Plastic Form2. Part I - The Ideal3. Part II - The Types of Art(α) Symbolic Art(β) Classical Art(γ) Romantic Art4. Part III - The Several Arts(α) Architecture(β) Sculpture(γ) Romantic Art, comprising(i) Painting(ii) Music(iii) Poetry5. Conclusion]Commentary

    David Hockney has worked in almost every medium - painting, drawing, stage design, photography and printmaking. He has undertaken an ambitious experiment with ways of seeing and ways of representing sight - ranging from his paintings, with their challenges to perspective and brilliant colours, to his vivid multi-dimensional photo-collages and his fax art, computer printings and coloured laser prints.

    Serving as both an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and as a text on how to interpret social history from the style of pictures in a given historical period, this new edition to Baxandall's pre-eminent scholarly volume examines early Renaissance painting, and explains how the style of painting in any society reflects the visual skills and habits that evolve out of daily life. Renaissance painting, for example, mirrors the experience of such activities as preaching, dancing, and gauging barrels. The volume includes discussions of a wide variety of painters, including Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Stefano di Giovanni, Sandro Botticelli, Masaccio, Luca Signorelli, Boccaccio, and countless others. Baxandall also defines and illustrates sixteen concepts used by a contemporary critic of painting, thereby assembling the basic equipment needed to explore fifteenth-century art.

    Suggests a theory of art, tests against the French and German avant-garde movements of the twenties, and discusses hermeneutics, ideology, aesthetic categories, and the autonomy of art."

    It can take many forms: photographs, videos, posters, billboards, charts, plans and, in particular, language itself. Tony Godfrey has written the first ever clear, extensive, concise and informative account of this fascinating phenomenon.

    Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

    Since then, painting has been declared dead several times over, and contemporary art has now expanded to include just about any object, action, or event: dance routines, slideshows, functional hair salons, seemingly random accretions of waste. In the meantime, being an artist has gone from a join-the-circus fantasy to a plausible vocation for scores of young people in America.But why--and how and by whom--does all this art get made? How is it evaluated? And for what, if anything, will today's artists be remembered? In The Contemporaries, Roger White, himself a young painter, serves as our spirited, skeptical guide through this diffuse creative world.White takes us into the halls of the RISD graduate program, where students learn critical lessons that go far beyond how to apply paint to canvases. In New York, we meet the neophytes who assist established artists--and who walk the fine line between "assistance" and "making the art." In Milwaukee, White trails a group of friends trying to create a viable scene where rent is cheap, but where the spotlight rarely shines. And he gives us an intimate perspective on three wildly different careers: that of Dana Schutz, an emerging star who is revitalizing painting; Mary Walling Blackburn, whose challenging art defies market forces; and Stephen Kaltenbach, a '70s wunderkind who is back on the critical radar, perhaps in spite of his own willful obscurity.From young artists trying to elbow their way in to those working hard at dropping out, White's essential book offers a once-in-a-generation glimpse of the inner workings of the American art world at a moment of unparalleled ambition, uncertainty, and creative exuberance.

    The Austrian poet and critic supports the idea of the universal necessity of art by exploring the history of literary and fine arts from a Marxist point of view.

    What Belting means by "the end of the history of art" is not the death of the discipline, but the end of a particular conception of artistic development as a meaningful, progressive historical sequence. Also included in the text is the historical background useful for understanding the development of the discipline and the origins of the rift between art-historical scholarship and contemporary artistic practice.

    They have become cultural icons, standing not only for different kinds of art but also for different ways of living. Matisse, known for his restraint and intense sense of privacy, for his decorum and discretion, created an art that transcended daily life and conveyed a sensuality that inhabited an abstract and ethereal realm of being. In contrast, Picasso became the exemplar of intense emotionality, of theatricality, of art as a kind of autobiographical confession that was often charged with violence and explosive eroticism. In Matisse and Picasso , Jack Flam explores the compelling, competitive, parallel lives of these two artists and their very different attitudes toward the idea of artistic greatness, toward the women they loved, and ultimately toward their confrontations with death.

    What is beauty? Umberto Eco, among Italy’s finest and most important contemporary thinkers, explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture. The profound and subtle text is lavishly illustrated with abundant examples of sublime painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. This is the first paperback edition of History of Beauty, making this intellectual and philosophical journey with one of the world’s most acclaimed thinkers available in a more compact and affordable format.From the Trade Paperback edition

    They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of "neurocurating," in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity.In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world's most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

    The strange saga of American architecture in the twentieth century makes for both high comedy and intellectual excitement as Wolfe debunks the European gods of modern and postmodern architecture and their American counterparts.

    ARTnews hailed this lively volume as "a fascinating book" by "a superb critic and art historian". For this Second Edition, the author adds a new final chapter and extensively reworks the last quarter of the hook to incorporate current thinking on the art of the last 20 years.