New Media in Art


Michael Rush - 1999
    In the past fifty years especially, ideas about time and duration have reinstated narrative in art, via filmmaking and video, the theatricality of happenings, performance and installation art, digitally manipulated photography, and virtual reality.This pioneering book, originally published in 1999 under the title New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, discusses the most influential artists internationally—from Eadweard Muybridge to Robert Rauschenberg, Bill Viola, and Pipilotti Rist—and those seminal works that have radically transformed the map of world art. For this new and expanded edition, the book has been brought completely up to date to include the latest in digital work as technology takes art in new directions.

The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites


Elizabeth Prettejohn - 2000
    This accessible new study provides the most comprehensive view of the movement to date. It shows us why, a century and a half later, Pre-Raphaelite art retains its power to fascinate, haunt, and often shock its viewers. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt produced a statement of ideas that revolutionized art practice in Victorian England. Critical of the Royal Academy's formulaic works, these painters believed that painting had been misdirected since Raphael. They and the artists who joined with them, including William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, and Frederick George Stephens, created bright works representing nature and literary themes in fresh detail and color. Considered heretical by many and frequently admonished for a lack of grace in composition the group disbanded after only a few years. Yet its artists and ideals remained influential; its works, greatly admired. In this richly illustrated book, Elizabeth Prettejohn raises new and provocative questions about the group's social and artistic identity. Was it the first avant-garde movement in modern art? What role did women play in the Pre-Raphaelite fraternity? How did relationships between the artists and models affect the paintings? The author also analyzes technique, pinning down the distinctive characteristics of these painters and evaluating the degree to which a group style existed. And she considers how Pre-Raphaelite art responded to and commented on its time and place a world characterized by religious and political controversy, new scientific concern for precise observation, the emergence of psychology, and changing attitudes toward sexuality and women. The first major publication on the Pre-Raphaelite movement in more than fifteen years, this exquisite volume incorporates the swell of recent research into a comprehensive, up-to-date survey. It comprises well over two hundred color reproductions, including works that are immediately recognizable as Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces, as well as lesser-known paintings that expand our appreciation of this significant artistic departure.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson


Camille Paglia - 1990
    It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.

Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry


Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - 1766
    Originally published in 1766, the Laocoön has been called the first extended attempt in modern times to define the distinctive spheres of art and poetry.

Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice


Otto G. Ocvirk - 1981
    This eleventh edition has been carefully revised to expand and clarify concepts throughout the text, while adding new material on developing ideas, critical thinking, and time and motion.

The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses


Juhani Pallasmaa - 1996
    This new, revised and extended edition of this seminal work will not only inspire architects and students to design more holistic architecture, but will enrich the general reader's perception of the world around them. The Eyes of the Skin has become a classic of architectural theory and consists of two extended essays. The first surveys the historical development of the ocular-centric paradigm in western culture since the Greeks, and its impact on the experience of the world and the nature of architecture. The second examines the role of the other senses in authentic architectural experiences, and points the way towards a multi-sensory architecture which facilitates a sense of belonging and integration.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide


Thomas P. Campbell - 2012
    It features a compelling and accessible design, beautiful color reproductions, and up-to-date descriptions written by the Museum's own experts.More than a simple souvenir book, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide provides a comprehensive view of art history spanning five millennia and the entire globe, beginning with the Ancient World and ending in contemporary times. It includes media as varied as painting, photography, costume, sculpture, decorative arts, musical instruments, arms and armor, works on paper, and many more. Presenting works ranging from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur to Canova's Perseus with the Head of Medusa to Sargent's Madame X, this is an indispensable volume for lovers of art and art history, and for anyone who has ever dreamed of lingering over the most iconic works in the Metropolitan's unparalleled collection.Now available as an eBook!The guide is now available to read on your tablet, mobile phone or personal computer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide eBook provides the same features as the printed version along with digital enhancements such as a linked table of contents for easy navigation, a double-click to zoom on works of art, and additional views of artworks. Like the print version, this eBook features a compelling and accessible design, beautiful photography, and up-to-date descriptions written by the Museum's own experts.The eBook is now available on Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks and Google Play.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America


Saidiya Hartman - 1997
    Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen's primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of "scenes" ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom.While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice.This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.

Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile


Jane Blocker - 1999
    In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities. As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist’s work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, and history of contemporary art.

Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style


Wilhelm Worringer - 1907
    Its profound impact not only on art historians and theorists but also for generations of creative writers and intellectuals is almost unprecedented. Starting from the notion that beauty derives from our sense of being able to identify with an object, Worringer argues that representational art produces satisfaction from our objectified delight in the self, reflecting a confidence in the world as it is as in Renaissance art. By contrast, the urge to abstraction, as exemplified by Egyptian, Byzantine, primitive, or modern expressionist art, articulates a totally different response to the world: it expresses man s insecurity. Thus in historical periods of anxiety and uncertainty, man seeks to abstract objects from their unpredictable state and transform them into absolute, transcendental forms. Abstraction and Empathy also has a sociological dimension, in that the urge to create fixed, abstract, and geometric forms is a response to the modern experience of industrialization and the sense that individual identity is threatened by a hostile mass society. Hilton Kramer s introduction considers the influence of Worringer s thesis and places his book in historical context."

The Language of New Media


Lev Manovich - 2001
    He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.

Dada: Art and Anti-Art


Hans Richter - 1964
    Here he records and traces Dada’s history, from its inception in about 1916 in wartime Zurich, to its collapse in Paris in 1922 when many of its members were to join the Surrealist movement, down to the present day when its spirit re-emerged first in the 1960s with, for example, Pop Art.This absorbing eye witness narrative is greatly enlivened by extensive use of Dada documents, illustrations and a variety of texts by fellow Dadaists. It is a unique document of the movement, whether in Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Paris or New York. The complex relationships and contributions of, among others, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Picabia, Arp, Schwitters, Hausmann, Duchamp, Ernst and Man Ray, are vividly brought to life.

The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century


Svetlana Alpers - 1983
    Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a 'textual culture,' this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to 'read' a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly 'visual culture.' It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not 'read' but 'seen,' in which new knowledge is visually recorded."—George Steiner, Sunday Times"There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction


Christopher W. Alexander - 1977
    It will enable making a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. ‘Patterns,’ the units of this language, are answers to design problems: how high should a window sill be?; how many stories should a building have?; how much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?More than 250 of the patterns in this language are outlined, each consisting of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature and human action as much in five hundred years as they are today.A Pattern Language is related to Alexander’s other works in the Center for Environmental Structure series: The Timeless Way of Building (introductory volume) and The Oregon Experiment.

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics


bell hooks - 1995
    Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.