It offers a mix of techniques and theory, while making an argument for the long-term value of studying perception-based drawing.

    Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book By Artists and Critics is a collection of texts from letters, manifestos, notes and interviews. Sources include, as the title says, artists and critics—some expected, like van Gogh, Gauguin, Apollinaire, Mondrian, Greenberg, just to name a few—and some less so: Trotsky and Hitler, in the section on Art and Politics. The book is a wonderful resource and insight into the way artists think and work.

    Human tastes in the arts, Dutton argues, are evolutionary traits, shaped by Darwinian selection. They are not, as the past century of art criticism and academic theory would have it, just "socially constructed."Our love of beauty is inborn, and many aesthetic tastes are shared across remote cultures—just one example is the widespread preference for landscapes with water and distant trees, like the savannas where we evolved. Using forceful logic and hard evidence, Dutton shows that we must premise art criticism on an understanding of evolution, not on abstract "theory." He restores the place of beauty, pleasure, and skill as artistic values.Sure to provoke discussion in scientific circles and uproar in the art world, The Art Instinct offers radical new insights into both the nature of art and the workings of the human mind.

    • A bestselling photography book with over 300,000 copies sold! • Learn top photography tips from 50 famous photographers • A must–have guide for amateur photographers and professional photographersRead This if You Want to Take Great Photographs contains no graphs, no techie diagrams and no camera–club jargon. Instead, it inspires readers through iconic images and playful copy, packed with hands–on tips.Split into five sections, the book covers composition, exposure, light, lenses and the art of seeing. Masterpieces by acclaimed photographers – including Henri Cartier–Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, Fay Godwin, Nadav Kander, Daido Moriyama and Martin Parr – serve to illustrate points and encourage readers to try out new ideas.Today's aspiring photographers want immediacy and see photography as an affordable way of expressing themselves quickly and creatively. This handbook meets their needs, teaching them how to take photographs using professional techniques.Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs is part of the internationally–bestselling 'Read This' series, which has sold over half–a–million books worldwide and has been translated into over 20 languages.More titles in the 'Read This' series:Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of People by Henry Carroll (9781780676241)Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of Places by Henry Carroll (9781780679051)Use This if You Want to Take Great Photographs: A Photo Journal by Henry Carroll (9781780678887)Read This if You Want to Be Great at Drawing by Selwyn Leamy (9781786270542)Use This if You Want to Be Great at Drawing by Selwyn Leamy (9781786274052)Read This if You Want to Be Great at Drawing People by Selwyn Leamy (9781786275127)Read This if You Want to Be a Great Writer by Ross Raisin (9781786271976)Read This if You Want to Be Instagram Famous edited by Henry Carroll (9781780679679)Read This If You Want to Be YouTube Famous by Will Eagle (9781786275134)

    Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, the Yale Women's Table, Wave Field -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age. Boundaries is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. Boundaries is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.

    

    This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work. Synopsis Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work. About Author: Biography Steven Izenour (1940-2001)

    He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

    These influential essays, interviews, and critical and theoretical comments provide bold and fertile insights into the construction of visual knowledge. Featuring a wide range of leading and emerging artists since 1945, the collection—while comprehensive and authoritative—offers the reader some eclectic surprises as well.Included here are texts that have become pivotal documents in contemporary art, along with writings that cover unfamiliar ground. Some are newly translated, others have never before been published. Together they address visual literacy, cultural studies, and the theoretical debates regarding modernism and postmodernism. The full panoply of visual media is represented, from painting and sculpture to environments, installations, performance, conceptual art, video, photography, and virtual reality. Thematic concerns range from figuration and process to popular culture, art and technology, and politics and the media. Contemporary issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality are also addressed.Kristine Stiles's general introduction is a succinct overview of artists' theories in the evolution of contemporary discourse around art. Introductions to each chapter provide synopses of the cultural contexts in which the texts originated and brief biographies of individual artists. The text is augmented by outstanding photographs, many of artists in their studios, and vivid, contemporary art images.Reflecting the editors' shared belief that artists' own theories provide unparalleled access to visual knowledge, this book, like its distinguished predecessors, Hershel Chipp's Theories of Modern Art (with Peter Selz and Joshua Taylor) and Joshua Taylor's Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in contemporary art."In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote 'in advance of the broken arm.' It was around that time that the word 'readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation."—Marcel Duchamp (1961)"Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional objects women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery. When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes find a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol about the relationships between men and women."—Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer (1978)"I want to create a fusion of art and life, Asia and America, Duchampiana modernism and Levi-Straussian savagism, cool form and hot video, dealing with all of those complex problems, spanning the tribal memory of the Nomadic Asians who crossed over the Bering Strait over 10,000 years ago."—Shigeko Kubota (1976)"Black for me is a lot more peaceful and gentle than white. White marble may be very beautiful, but you can't read anything on it. I wanted something that would be soft on the eyes, and turn into a mirror if you polished it. The point is to see yourself reflected in the names. Also the mirror image doubles and triples the space."—Maya Lin (1983)"Artists often depend on the manipulation of symbols to present ideas and associations not always apparent in such symbols. If all such ideas and associations were evident there would be little need for artists to give expression to them. In short, there would be no need to make art."—Andres Serrano (1989)

    His vision of the impact of modern technology on the contemporary global condition is powerful and disturbing, ranging over art, science, politics and warfare.In Art and Fear, Paul Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the twentieth century. In his provocative and challenging vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. He traces the connections between the way early twentieth century avant-garde artists twisted and tortured the human form before making it vanish in abstraction, and the blasting to bits of men who were no more than cannon fodder i nthe trenches of the Great War; and between the German Expressionists' hate-filled portraits of the damned, and the 'medical' experiments of the Nazi eugenicists; and between the mangled messages of global advertising, and the organisation of global terrorism.Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, science has finally left art behind, as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, with the human being the raw material for new and monstrous forms of life.Art and Fear is essential reading for anyone wondering where art has gone and where science is taking us.

    This bestseller balances a comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory — from Plato to the present — with the most thorough editorial support for understanding these challenging readings.

    It explores how issues of race, class, nationality and sexuality, enter into debates about feminism, and includes work by feminist critics, artists and activists. Articles are grouped into six thematic sections:* representation* difference* disciplines/strategies* mass culture/media interventions* the body* technology.A valuable reference for students of visual culture and gender studies, this is both a framework within which to understand the shifts in feminist thinking in visual studies and an overview of the most significant feminist theories in this area.

    The book provides a concise survey of the evolution of art, from cave drawings to Jackson Pollock, and summarizes the essence of art movements, such as Gothic, Baroque, Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Tachism.

    J. Clark rewrites the history of modern art. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he explains, the project called socialism may have come to an end at roughly the same moment as modernism. Did modernism and socialism depend on each other for their vitality—for their sense of the future and their wish to live in a fully material world? Have they died? Aware of modernism’s foibles and blind spots, but passionately attached to the movement’s wildness, Clark poses these fundamental questions in Farewell to an Idea. Modernism, Clark argues, was an extreme answer to an extreme condition—the one Max Weber summed up as “the disenchantment of the world.” Clark focuses on instances of maximum stress, when the movement revealed its true nature. The book begins with Jacques-Louis David, painting at the height of the Terror in 1793, then leaps forward to Pissarro a hundred years later, struggling to picture Two Young Peasant Women ina way that agreed with his anarchist politics. Next the author turns in succession to Cézanne’s paintings of the Grandes Baigneuses and their coincidence in time (and maybe intention) with Freud’s launching of psychoanalysis; to Picasso’s Cubism; and to avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution. Clark concludes with a reading of Jackson Pollock’s tragic version of abstraction and suggests a new set of terms to describe avant-garde art—perhaps in its final flowering—in America after 1945. Shifting between broad, speculative history and intense analysis of specific works, Clark not only transfigures our usual understanding of modern art, he also launches a new set of proposals about modernity itself.

    Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art—which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place.