Art

    Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real lived experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage. Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity. Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, Gaga Feminism is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.

    Confronts the effects of modernism on society and proposes a remedy based on a redefinition of our art and culture

    In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

    These crippling fears are laid to rest through insightful discussions of personal experiences, the struggles of famous artists, and the rewards of producing art that comes from an authentic creative core. Providing sensitive reassurances that these struggles are normal, these essays encourage artists to focus on the development of their crafts and find inspiration to work through self-doubt.

    The rocker settled in Berlin, where he would make his “Berlin Trilogy”—the albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger, which are now considered some of the most critically acclaimed and innovative of the late twentieth century. But Bowie’s time in Berlin was about more than producing new music. As Tobias Rüther describes in this fascinating tale of Bowie’s Berlin years, the musician traveled to West Berlin—the capital of his childhood dreams and the city of Expressionism—to repair his body and mind from the devastation of drug addiction, delusions, and mania.             Painting a vivid picture of Bowie’s life in the Schöneberg area of the city, Rüther describes the artist’s friendships and collaborations with his roommate, Iggy Pop, as well as Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. Rüther illustrates Bowie’s return to painting, days cycling to the Die Brücke museum, and his exploration of the city’s nightlife, both the wild side and the gay scene. In West Berlin, Bowie also met singer and actress Romy Haag; came to know Hansa Studios, where he would record Low and Heroes; and even landed the part of a Prussian aristocrat in Just a Gigolo, starring alongside Marlene Dietrich. Eventually Rüther uses Bowie and his explorations of the cultural and historical undercurrents of West Berlin to examine the city itself: divided, caught in the Cold War, and how it began to redefine itself as a cultural metropolis, turning to the arts to start a new history. Tying in with an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in September, 2014, Heroes tells the fascinating story of how the music of the future arose from the spirit of the past. It is an unforgettable look at one of the world’s most renowned musicians in one of its most inspiring cities.

    A Dutch artist offers his concept of seeing and drawing as a discipline by which the world may be rediscovered, a way of experiencing Zen.

    Beginning as the unofficial photographer for punk legends The Misfits and later taking charge of the bass guitar as a founding member of underground pioneers Samhain and metal gods Danzig, the evil eye of Eerie Von's camera captured the dark heart of rock's most vital and bleeding-edge period, a time when rock and roll was not only dangerous, but downright menacing. Eerie Von's lens has documented everything from The Misfits' humble beginnings in Lodi, New Jersey, to the heights of Danzig's stadium-rock glory alongside metal superstars Metallica. As well as an essential visual document of music history, Eerie's road stories of triumph and damnation bring to life an era the likes of which will never again be seen.

    Because music consoles and restores us. Through music, whether we are listening or playing, we know ourselves more intimately, more honestly, and more clearly with every note. And with every note, music offers us a hand to the beyond.Through music, we can say what we didn't even know we felt.This book is an ode to music, and a celebration of humanity's greatest creation. It is not a call to arms, but a call to instruments.In music, Ed Ayres finds answers to the big questions life throws at us. Using personal anecdotes - including those relating to his transition from Emma to Ed - and observations from teaching and learning music, Ed finds hope in our desire to become whole, with some simple music lessons along the way.PRAISE'Whole Notes may appear to be about music, but really, it's simply about how to be kind and how to listen without judgement. Which is the best definition of love, no?' Jessie Tu, Sydney Morning Herald'A truly beguiling account' Geraldine Doogue'An almost divine presence' Rick Morton

    The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical re-forming of compositional technique and in John Cage's move into zen music, in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system, and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies, in Karlheinz Stockhausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that have continued to unfold. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no single history of music. We live' as Griffiths says, among many simultaneous histories'. His study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how they converge and diverge.

    It shows how the components of design interact with each other, and provides a strategy for creating coherent and workable relationships among these design components, highlighting key design issues. Written in an informal, jargon-free style, the new Third Edition incorporates examples and hands-on exercises.

    In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?

    Noted film scholar V. F. Perkins presents criteria for expanding our understanding and enjoyment of movies. He employs commonsense words like balance, coherence, significance, and satisfaction to develop his insightful support of the subtle approach and of the unobtrusive director. Readers will learn why a scene from the humbler movie Carmen Jones is a deeper realization of filmmaking than the bravura lion sequence in the classic Battleship Potemkin. Along the way Perkins invites readers to re-experience with clarity, directness, and simplicity other famous scenes by directors like Hitchcock, Eisenstein, and Chaplin. Perkins examines the origins of movies and embraces their use of both realism and magic, their ability to record as well as to create. In the process he seeks to discover the synthesis between these opposing elements. With the delight of the fan and the perception of the critic, Perkins advances a film theory, based on the work of Bazin and other early film theorists, that is rich with suggestion for debate and further pursuit. Sit beside Perkins as he reacquaints you with cinema, heightens your awareness, deepens your pleasure, and increases your return every time you invest in a movie ticket.

    Guptill's classic Rendering in Pen and Ink has long been regarded as the most comprehensive book ever published on the subject of ink drawing. This is a book designed to delight and instruct anyone who draws with pen and ink, from the professional artist to the amateur and hobbyist. It is of particular interest to architects, interior designers, landscape architects, industrial designers, illustrators, and renderers. Contents include a review of materials and tools of rendering; handling the pen and building tones; value studies; kinds of outline and their uses; drawing objects in light and shade; handling groups of objects; basic principles of composition; using photographs, study of the work of well-known artists; on-the-spot sketching; representing trees and other landscape features; drawing architectural details; methods of architectural rendering; examination of outstanding examples of architectural rendering; solving perspective and other rendering problems; handling interiors and their accessories; and finally, special methods of working with pen including its use in combination with other media. The book is profusely illustrated with over 300 drawings that include the work of famous illustrators and renderers of architectural subjects such as Rockwell Kent, Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, Willy Pogany, Reginald Birch, Harry Clarke, Edward Penfield, Joseph Clement Coll, F.L. Griggs, Samuel V. Chamberlain, Louis C. Rosenberg, John Floyd Yewell, Chester B. Price, Robert Lockwood, Ernest C. Peixotto, Harry C. Wilkinson, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and Birch Burdette Long. Best of all, Arthur Guptill enriches the text with drawings of his own.

    A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century. Vivid and eminently readable, Weimar Culture is the finest introduction for the casual reader and historian alike.