In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.

    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.

    He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power.The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power.The Field of Cultural Production will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.

    Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

    According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an "underside" in which seemingly intelligible forms lose their clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he goes on to contend, have failed to engage this underside, where images harbor limits and contradictions, because their discipline is based upon the assumption that visual representation is made up of legible signs and lends itself to rational scholarly cognition epitomized in the "science of iconology."To escape from this cul-de-sac, Didi-Huberman suggests that art historians look to Freud's concept of the "dreamwork," not for a code of interpretation, but rather to begin to think of representation as a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction. Confronting Images also offers brilliant, historically grounded readings of images ranging from the Shroud of Turin to Vermeer's Lacemaker.

    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.

    Indeed it was with a Salon review that he made his literary debut: and it is significant that even at this early stage - in 1845 - he was already articulating the need for a painter who could depict the heroism of modern life. This he was to find in Constantin Guys, whom he later celebrated in the famous essay which provides the title-piece for this collection. Other material in this volume includes important and extended studies of three of Baudelaire's contemporary heroes - Delacroix, Poe and Wagner - and some more general articles, such as those on the theory and practice of caricature, and on what Baudelaire, with intentional scorn, called philosophic art. This last article develops views only touched on in Baudelaire's other writings. This volume is extensively illustrated with reproductions of works referred to in the text and otherwise relevant to it. It provides a survey of some of the most important ideas and individuals in the critical world of the great poet who has been called the father of modern art criticism.

    Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.

    Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.

    In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word.

    These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.

    Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum to remove the work is to destroy the work is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

    He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Felix Guattari (1930-1992) was a psychoanalyst at the la Borde Clinic, as well as being a major social theorist and radical activist. A Thousand Plateaus is part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for nomadic thought and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement.Translated by Brian Massumi

    However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form is now recognized as not only an important and influential work of aesthetic theory, but also one of the first major works in European literature on the Sublime, a subject that has fascinated thinkers from Kant and Coleridge to the philosophers and critics of today.

    Art as Therapy is packed with 150 examples of outstanding art, with chapters on Love, Nature, Money, and Politics outlining how these works can help with common difficulties. For example, Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter helps us focus on what we want to be loved for; Serra's Fernando Passoa reminds us of the importance of dignity in suffering; and Manet's Bunch of Asparagus teaches us how to preserve and value our long-term partners.De Botton demonstrates how art can guide and console us, and along the way, help us to better understand both art and ourselves.