Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins


Jacques Derrida - 1990
    Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is itself blind; as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing (direct) with another (mediated). Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. Memoirs of the Blind is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including Diderot's Lettres sur les aveugles, the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life, and Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, Memoirs of the Blind extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in Truth and Painting. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts.

The Infinity of Lists


Umberto Eco - 2009
    This infinity of lists is no coincidence: a culture prefers enclosed, stable forms when it is sure of its own identity, while when faced with a jumbled series of ill-defined phenomena, it starts making lists. The poetics of lists runs throughout the history of art and literature. We do not only see it at work in ancient bestiaries, the celestial hosts of angels or the naturalist collections of the 16th century. We also find it more obliquely from Homer to Joyce, from the treasures of Gothic cathedrals to the fantastic landscapes of Bosch and cabinets of curiosities, until we get to Andy Warhol and Arman in the 20th century. In this 5-colour illustrated edition, Umberto Eco reflects on how the idea of catalogues has changed over the centuries and how, from one period to another, it has expressed the spirit of the times. His essay is accompanied by a literary anthology and a wide selection of works of art illustrating and analysing the texts presented. This new illustrated essay is a companion volume to On Beauty and On Ugliness.

Adobe InDesign CS6 Classroom in a Book


Adobe Creative Team - 2012
    The 16 project-based lessons show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working with InDesign CS6. Readers learn what they need to know to create engaging page layouts using InDesign CS6. This completely revised CS6 edition covers the new tools for adding PDF form fields, linking content, and creating alternative layouts for digital publishing. The companion CD includes all the lesson files that readers need to work along with the book. This thorough, self-paced guide to Adobe InDesign CS6 is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of this program. Readers who already have some experience with InDesign can improve their skills and learn InDesign's newest features. "The Classroom in a Book series is by far the best training material on the market. Everything you need to master the software is included: clear explanations of each lesson, step-by-step instructions, and the project files for the students." -Barbara Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor, Rocky Mountain Training Classroom in a Book(R), the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does-an official training series from Adobe Systems Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts. All of Peachpit's eBooks contain the same content as the print edition. You will find a link in the last few pages of your eBook that directs you to the media files.Helpful tips:If you are able to search the book, search for "Where are the lesson files?"Go to the very last page of the book and scroll backwards.You will need a web-enabled device or computer in order to access the media files that accompany this ebook. Entering the URL supplied into a computer with web access will allow you to get to the files.Depending on your device, it is possible that your display settings will cut off part of the URL. To make sure this is not the case, try reducing your font size and turning your device to a landscape view. This should cause the full URL to appear.

Design as an Attitude (JRP | Ringier Documents Series)


Alice Rawsthorn - 2018
    

Stories of Art


James Elkins - 2002
    Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrates so persuasively, there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about themselves, about other cultures - and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. But each of us also has our own story of art, a kind of private art history made up of the pieces we have seen, and loved or hated, the effects they had on us, and the connections that might be drawn among them.Elkins opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. What about all the art not produced in Western Europe or in the Europeanized Americas? Is it possible to include Asian art and Indian art in 'the story?' What happens when one does? To help us find answers, he uses both Western and non-Western artworks, tables of contents from art histories written in cultures outside the centre of Western European tradition, and strangely wonderful diagrams of how artworks might connect through a single individual. True multiculturalism may be an impossibility, but art lovers can each create a 'story of art' that is right for themselves.

Just My Type: A Book about Fonts


Simon Garfield - 2010
    Whether you’re enraged by Ikea’s Verdanagate, want to know what the Beach Boys have in common with easy Jet or why it’s okay to like Comic Sans, Just My Type will have the answer. Learn why using upper case got a New Zealand health worker sacked. Refer to Prince in the Tafkap years as a Dingbat (that works on many levels). Spot where movies get their time periods wrong and don’t be duped by fake posters on eBay. Simon Garfield meets the people behind the typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts – like men – are from Mars and some are from Venus. From type on the high street and album covers, to the print in our homes and offices, Garfield is the font of all types of knowledge.

Two-Dimensional Man


Paul Sahre - 2017
    Sahre explores his mostly vain attempts to escape his "suburban Addams Family" upbringing and the death of his elephant-trainer brother. He also wrestles with the cosmic implications involved in operating a scanner, explains the disappearance of ice machines, analyzes a disastrous meeting with Steely Dan, and laments the typos, sunsets, and poor color choices that have shaped his work and point of view. Two-Dimensional Man portrays the designer's life as one of constant questioning, inventing, failing, dreaming, and ultimately making.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human


Harold Bloom - 1998
    A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology


W.J. Thomas Mitchell - 1986
    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.

Photography Changes Everything


Marvin Heiferman - 2012
    Compiling hundreds of images and responses from leading authorities on photography, it offers a brilliant, reader-friendly exploration of the many ways in which photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. The volume draws on the extraordinary visual assets of the Smithsonian Institution's museums, science centers and archives to launch an unprecedented interdisciplinary dialogue on photography's capacity to shape and change our experience of the world. Photography Changes Everything features over 300 images and nearly 100 engaging short texts commissioned from experts, writers, inventors, public figures and others--from Hugh Hefner to John Baldessari, John Waters, Robert Adams, Sandra Phillips and many others. Each story responds to images selected by project contributors. Together they engage readers in a timely exploration of the extent to which our lives have been transformed through our interactions with photographic imagery. Edited by leading photography curator and author Marvin Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything provides a unique opportunity to better understand the history, practice and power of photography at this transitional moment in visual culture.

Notes on Conceptualisms


Vanessa Place - 2009
    Poetics. In NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS, Place and Fitterman erect the first critical framework toward the understanding of conceptual writing, an emergent early twenty-first century literary movement. Elegantly parsed and carefully dissected, this work fleshes out many of the missing details proposed thus far regarding the methodologies and strategies of how to proceed with innovative writing. Both direct and oblique, NOTES is itself a self-reflexive work of conceptual writing in the guise of theory; or is it a work of theory in the guise of conceptual writing? By smartly straddling the creative and the critical, this book does twice the work toward our understanding of what it means to be contemporary--Kenneth Goldsmith.

Chip Kidd


Veronique Vienne - 2003
    Chip Kidd is renowned and revered as a maverick graphic designer. Specifically, Kidd's book jacket designs for such major New York publishers as Alfred A. Knopf are among the most significant and innovative of our time. This richly illustrated book--the first critical selection of kid's design work--looks closely at this contemporary visual pioneer. Veronique Vienne presents a full and nuanced view of Kidd, discussing how he has developed celebrity status as a designer, design critic, lecturer, and editor. She also relates how Kidd is greatly influenced by popular culture, noting his vast collection of Batman memorabilia. Vienne concludes by examining Kidd's editorial involvement with books on cartoonists as well as his own first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, published in 2001 to critical acclaim. Chip Kidd reveals the fascinating life and career of a revolutionary graphic designer with a winning public persona, whose ambitions now also lean toward editing and writing. The book will appeal to anyone involved in design and popular culture as well as admirers of Kidd's extraordinary creative spirit.

Ways of Curating


Hans Ulrich Obrist - 2014
    Since then he has staged more than 250 shows internationally, many of them among the most influential exhibits of our age. Ways of Curating is a compendium of the insights Obrist has gained from his years of extraordinary work in the art world. It skips between centuries and continents, flitting from meetings with the artists who have inspired him (including Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, and Gilbert and George) to biographies of influential figures such as Diaghilev and Walter Hopps. It describes some of the greatest exhibitions in history, as well as some of the greatest exhibitions never realized. It traces the evolution of the collections from Athanasius Kircher's 17th-century Wunderkammer to modern museums, and points the way for projects yet to come. Hans Ulrich Obrist has rescued the word "curate" from wine stores and playlists to remind us of the power inherent in looking at art—and at the world—in a new way.

Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery


Jeanette Winterson - 1995
    For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times

Stanley Donwood: There Will Be No Quiet


Stanley Donwood - 2019
    His influential work spans many practices over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installation work to printmaking. Here, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches, and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, each chapter is dedicated to a major work—whether an album cover, promotional piece, or a personal project—and is presented as a step-by-step working case study. Featuring commentary by Thom Yorke and never-before-seen archival material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood’s creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. It is a must-have for fans of the band and anyone interested in graphic design and popular culture.