It’s about the re-making of your interior world as the exterior world becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain.The sudden arrival of the pandemic pushed the world faster and further into the 21st century. Now, life is dictated by two forces you can’t see: data and the virus. Are you really built for so much change so quickly?Basar/Coupland/Obrist’s prequel, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, became an instant cult classic. It’s been described as, “a mediation on the madness of our media,” and, “an abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world.”Like that book, The Extreme Self collapses comedy and calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70 of the world’s foremost artists, photographers, technologists and musicians, while Daly & Lyon’s kinetic design elevates the language of memes into a manifesto. Over fourteen timely chapters, The Extreme Self tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. This is an eye-opening, provocative portrait of what’s really happening to YOU.

    Famous for his decadent photography, Newton shares his life and times in a tell-all that reveals as much about his narcissism as his artistry.

    Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can't do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

    Of that second category, Lawrence Weschler is the master. Witness the pieces in this splendidly disorienting collection, spanning twenty years of his career and the full range of his concerns–which is to say, practically everything.Only Lawrence Weschler could reveal the connections between the twentieth century’s Yugoslav wars and the equally violent Holland in which Vermeer created his luminously serene paintings. In his profile of Roman Polanski, Weschler traces the filmmaker’s symbolic negotiations with his nightmarish childhood during the Holocaust. Here, too, are meditations on artists Ed Kienholz and David Hockney, on the author’s grandfather and daughter, and on the light and earthquakes of his native Los Angeles. Haunting, elegant, and intoxicating, Vermeer in Bosnia awakens awe and wonder at the world around us.

    'Here Comes Everybody' is an examination of how the spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form and exist within groups, with profound long-term economic and social effects, for good and for ill.

    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.

    This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.

    Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other aspiring writers, the book first navigates readers through the key elements of style and content, from the aims and structure of a piece to its tone and language. Brimming with practical tips that range across the complete spectrum of art-writing, the second part of the book is organized around its specific forms, including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews; and writing for websites and blogs.In counseling the reader against common pitfalls—such as jargon and poor structure—Gilda Williams points instead to the power of close looking and research, showing how to deploy language effectively; how to develop new ideas; and how to construct compelling texts. More than 30 illustrations throughout support closely analysed case studies of the best writing, in Source Texts by 64 authors, including Claire Bishop, Thomas Crow, T.J. Demos, Okwui Enwezor, Dave Hickey, John Kelsey, Chris Kraus, Rosalind Krauss, Stuart Morgan, Hito Steyerl, and Adam Szymczyk.Supplemented by a general bibliography, advice on the use and misuse of grammar, and tips on how to construct your own contemporary art library, How to Write About Contemporary Art is the essential handbook for all those interested in communicating about the art of today.

    Discusses the terms, movements, and major artists in the modern American and European art world.

    Here is everything you need to know: from the most practical advice (the fundamental facts about light sources) to the most sophisticated nuances (how light is measured through photometry), from the basics of the camera (which button controls which function) to the finer points of framing with an LCD viewfinder, featuring a selection of Ang’s most inspiring images. For users of film cameras, Ang explains the differences between types of film and details the various methods of processing and darkroom techniques.Ang delves into the development and transformation of photography by digital techniques. For the digital-camera contingent, there’s a specificity of previously unavailable information about the cameras and about processing, digitizing, and outputting the images. Ang also discusses subjects usually ignored in manuals but of interest to all photographers, including critical theory, the presentation of images, the function of the human eye in the perception of images, and ethical and copyright issues.Fundamentals of Photography is an essential book for every photographer.

    Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white Polaroid photographs from the 1970s--a medium in which he established the style that would bring him international acclaim--are brought together in this exquisite volume for the first time.Prestel Publications

    Recognizing that The Great War was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole, author Modris Eksteins examines the lives of ordinary people, works of modern literature, and pivotal historical events to redefine the way we look at our past and toward our future.

    Mumford has drawn on every aspect of life to explain the machine and to trace its social results. "An extraordinarily wide-ranging, sensitive, and provocative book about a subject upon whichphilosophers have so far shed but little light" (Journal of Philosophy).

    But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.

    He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art. "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books