George Kubler draws upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics and replaces the notion of style with the idea of a linked succession of works distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same action. The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the ecstatic concept of style--the usual basis for conventional histories of art.

    Suggests a theory of art, tests against the French and German avant-garde movements of the twenties, and discusses hermeneutics, ideology, aesthetic categories, and the autonomy of art."

    Revealing the medieval world in all its astonishing diversity, the selections reflect the culture of the people who lived during the period, and the contributions they made to their world and our own.Including, in the best translations, familiar texts such as The Song of Roland, St. Augustine's Confessions and Dante's Divine Comedy, the book also contains the work of many less familiar writers, including prominent medieval women such as Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pisan and Margery Kempe. Finally, with the inclusion of many selections illustrating medieval social history, such as The Peasants Revolt of 1381 from the Anonimalle Chronicle, The Medieval Reader brings the Middle Ages to life in a way that no narrative history could.

    Hebdige [...] is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.' - Rolling StoneWith enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book - Time OutThis book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era - The New York Times

    The language is, throughout, simple, sensuous, and direct. We can be grateful for this book and this poet." --Jay Parini"I have known the poetry of Edward Hirsch for some time, and have greatly admired it. But I even more greatly admire his Wild Gratitude as a general collection, and I am convinced that the best poems here are unsurpassed in our time." --Robert Penn Warren

    Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

    The Art of Color, this book covers subjective feeling and objective color principles in detail. It presents the key to understanding color in ltten's color circle and color contrasts.

    His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.

    This volume contains twenty-seven pieces, including the influential introduction to the catalog for Three American Painters, the text of his book Morris Louis, and the renowned "Art and Objecthood." Originally published between 1962 and 1977, they continue to generate debate today. These are uncompromising, exciting, and impassioned writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture. Ranging from brief reviews to extended essays, and including major critiques of Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, these writings establish a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the viability of Clement Greenberg’s account of the infralogic of modernism, the status of figuration after Pollock, the centrality of the problem of shape, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, and the relationship between work and beholder. In a number of essays Fried contrasts the modernist enterprise with minimalist or literalist art, and, taking a position that remains provocative to this day, he argues that minimalism is essentially a genre of theater, hence artistically self-defeating.For this volume Fried has also provided an extensive introductory essay in which he discusses how he became an art critic, clarifies his intentions in his art criticism, and draws crucial distinctions between his art criticism and the art history he went on to write. The result is a book that is simply indispensable for anyone concerned with modernist painting and sculpture and the task of art criticism in our time.

    In this easy-to-navigate A to Z guide, the authors’ playful explanations draw on key artworks, artists, and events from around the globe, including how the lights going on and off won the Turner Prize, what makes the likes of Marina Abramovic and Ai Weiwei such great artists, and why Kanye West would trade his Grammys to be one.Packed with behind-the-scenes information and completely free of jargon, Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? is the perfect gallery companion and the go to guide for when the next big thing leaves you stumped.

    They have become cultural icons, standing not only for different kinds of art but also for different ways of living. Matisse, known for his restraint and intense sense of privacy, for his decorum and discretion, created an art that transcended daily life and conveyed a sensuality that inhabited an abstract and ethereal realm of being. In contrast, Picasso became the exemplar of intense emotionality, of theatricality, of art as a kind of autobiographical confession that was often charged with violence and explosive eroticism. In Matisse and Picasso , Jack Flam explores the compelling, competitive, parallel lives of these two artists and their very different attitudes toward the idea of artistic greatness, toward the women they loved, and ultimately toward their confrontations with death.

    In the essay, originally published in Spanish in 1925, Ortega grappled philosophically with the newness of nonrepresentational art and sought to make it more understandable to a public confused by it. Many embraced the essay as a manifesto extolling the virtues of vanguard artists and promoting their efforts to abandon the realism and the romanticism of the nineteenth century.The dehumanization of the title, which was meant descriptively rather than pejoratively, referred most literally to the absence of human forms in nonrepresentational art, but also to its insistent unpopularity, its indifference to the past, and its iconoclasm. Ortega championed what he saw as a new cultural politics with the goal of a total transformation of society.Ortega was an immensely gifted writer in the best belletristic tradition. His work has been compared to an iceberg because it hides the critical mass of its erudition beneath the surface, and because it is deceptive, appearing to be more spontaneous and informal than it really is.Princeton published the first English translation of the essay paired with another entitled Notes on the Novel. Three essays were later added to make an expanded edition, published in 1968, under the title The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature .

    Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture. 8 illustrations.

    His pioneering study is informed by the conviction that color is a contingent, historical occurrence whose meaning, like language, lies in the particular contexts in which it is experienced and interpreted.Gage covers topics as diverse as the optical mixing techniques implicit in mosaic; medieval color-symbolism; the equipment of the manuscript illuminator's workshop, the color languages and color practices of Latin America at the time of the Spanish Conquest; the earliest history of the prism; and the color ideas of Goethe and Runge, Blake and Turner, Seurat and Matisse.From the perspective of the history of science, Gage considers the bearing of Newton's optical discoveries on painting, the chemist Chevreul's contact with painters and the growing interest of experimental psychologists in the topic of color in the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to synaesthesia. He includes an invaluable overview of the twentieth-century literature that bears on the historical interpretation of color in art. Gage's explorations further extend the concepts he addressed in his prize-winning book, Color and Culture.

    He insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects is among “the most backwards disciplines in the academy.” Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture.Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of “distant reading,” set forth in his path-breaking essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.