as beautiful, and yet we know also that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. concrete and the sublime. also to celebrate its mysterious and at times mythical power. complementary interpretations, leading us from Hogarth's belief that the essence of beauty lies in shapely curves, to Kant's discourses on the meaning of pleasure. response both to beauty and to happiness. As he shows, the ability to truly recognise the beauty that surrounds us in the everyday could enable us to deepen the enjoyment of our lives.

    Taking up such figures as Giles de Rais, Erzebet Bathory, the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, Andre Breton, Voodoo practitioners, and Chinese torture victims, Bataille reveals their common obsession: death.This essay, illustrated with artwork from every era, was developed out of ideas explored in Erotism: Death and Sexuality and Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art. In it Bataille examines death—the "little death" that follows sexual climax, the proximate death in sadomasochistic practices, and death as part of religious ritual and sacrifice."Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century."— Michel FoucaultGeorges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. In 1959, Bataille began Tears of Eros, and it was completed in 1961, his final work. City Lights published two of his other works: Story of the Eye and The Impossible. Bataille died in 1962.

    Its introduction of a feminist perspective into this largely male-oriented discipline made shockwaves that are still felt forcefully today. Drawing upon feminist cultural theory previously little applied to the visual arts, Griselda Pollock offers concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art. Crucially, she not only provides a feminist re-reading of the work of canonical male Impressionist and Pre-Raphaelite artists including Edgar Degas and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but also re-inserts into art history their female contemporaries - women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Casting her critical eye over the contemporary art scene, Pollock discusses the work of women artists such as Mary Kelly and Yve Lomax, highlighting the problems of working in a culture where the feminine is still defined as the object of the male gaze.Now published with a new introduction by Griselda Pollock, 'Vision and Difference' remains as powerful and as essential reading as ever for all those seeking not only to understand the history of the feminine in art but also to develop new strategies for representation for the future.

    Recipes for poetic terror, anarcho -black magic, post-situ psychotropic surgery, denunciations of spiritual addictions to vapid infotainment cults - this is the bastard classic, the watermark impressed upon our minds. Where conscience informs praxis, and action infects consciousness, T.A.Z. is beginning to worm its way into above-ground culture. This book offers inspired blasts of writing, from slogans to historical essays, on the need to insert revolutionary happiness into everyday life through poetic action, and celebrating the radical optimism present in outlaw cultures. It should appeal to alternative thinkers and punks everywhere, as it celebrates liberation, love and poetic living. The new edition contains the full text of Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism, the complete communiques and flyers of the Association fo Ontological Anarchy, the long essay 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone, ' and a new preface by the author

    Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state with austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This important book is an original contribution to film analysis and a key work by one of our most searching directors and writers.

    Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary."how to be interesting, line after line."Contents:Charles DickensBoys' WeekliesInside the WhaleDrama Reviews: The Tempest, The Peaceful InnFilm Review: The Great DictatorWells, Hitler and the World StateThe Art of Donald McGillNo, Not OneRudyard KiplingT.S. EliotCan Socialists Be Happy?Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador DaliPropaganda and Demotic SpeechRaffles and Miss BlandishGood Bad BooksThe Prevention of LiteraturePolitics and the English LanguageConfessions of a Book ReviewerPolitics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's TravelsLear, Tolstoy and the FoolWriters and LeviathanReview of The Heart of the Matter by Graham GreeneReflections on Gandhi

    The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. These two modes will be analysed with reference to the work of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan.

    Lippard, author of the highly original and popular Mixed Blessings, merged her art-world concerns with those of the then-fledgling women’s movement. In a career that spans sixteen books and scores of articles, catalogs, and essays on art, political activism, feminism, and multiculturalism, her engaging and provocative writings have heralded a new way of thinking about art and its role in the feminist movement.This new collection of previously published essays covers more than two decades of Lippard’s thinking on the ever-evolving definitions of feminist art, the convergence of high and low art, political and activist art, and the contributions of feminist theory to the politics of identity that infuses the production and exhibition of much of today’s fine and popular art.With a new introduction from the author, The Pink Glass Swan brings together selections from two of Lippard’s leading works, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Art and Get the Message?: A Decade of Art for Social Change, and numerous other articles written for newspapers, magazines, and art catalogs across the country.

    It is not primarily concerned with specific pictures and the things people say about them, but rather with the way we talk about the idea of imagery, and all its related notions of picturing, imagining, perceiving, likening, and imitating. It is a book about images, therefore, that has no illustrations except for a few schematic diagrams, a book about vision written as if by a blind author for a blind reader. If it contains any insight into real, material pictures, it is the sort that might come to a blind listener, overhearing the conversation the sighted speakers talking about images. My hypothesis is that such a listener might see patterns in these conversations that would be invisible to the sighted participant.

    In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it--with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.

    Not only did he smuggle his pieces into four of New York City's major art museums, he's also "hung" his work at London's Tate Gallery and adorned Israel's West Bank barrier with satirical images. Banksy's identity remains unknown, but his work is unmistakable with prints selling for as much as $45,000.

    From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. Even in the present day, despite Darwin's discoveries, nearly all schools of thought take as their starting point the belief that humans are radically different from other animals. John Gray argues that this humanist belief is an illusion. The aim of Straw Dogs is to explore how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned.Straw Dogs explores philosophical issues such as the nature of the self, free will, morality, progress and the value of truth. Drawing his inspiration from art, poetry, and the frontiers of science as well as philosophy itself, John Gray presents a post-humanist view of the world and of human life. Straw Dogs is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question their deepest beliefs.

    Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.

    Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image?In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.

    Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cézanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cézanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cézanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art."Rilke makes the feeling and views around great art real, weaving into his letters the indescribable thing that gives us beauty, truth, pleasure."--HELEN FRANKENTHALER, Art & Antiques"[These letters] are themselves extraordinarily peaceful and concentrated, seeping with the sense and recognition of Cézanne's colors, in nature as on canvas, colors which seem a part of Rilke himself, of the words and paper."--JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books