Fractured Light focuses on a key body of work by the British artist Johnnie Cooper, which was instrumental in his transformation from sculptor to painter. Throughout the 1990s, with a renewed dedication Cooper embarked on an industrious and experimental trajectory with paint and collage. These works on paper, made by layering multiple strips of paintings, were directly inspired by a series of large assemblage works he constructed during the late 1980s, when the culmination of his work in art education brought a new found freedom. The view from a new studio in rural Worcestershire conjured fresh inspirations and instilled a fascination with the ever-changing colour, shape and light values that fractured through a nearby woodland over the course of a day. This book documents an important part of Cooper's oeuvre and is a must for enthusiasts of Johnnie's work or anyone who is into British Expressionism or abstract art. It accompanies an exhibition, also called Fractured Light, and follows Johnnie Cooper: Sunset Strip, a major monograph on the artist in 2019, also published by Black Dog Press.

Olly Moss has quickly become, according to Slashfilm, "one of the most in demand and influential pop culture artists today". For his simple but brilliant first book, Olly has put his own twist on the Victorian art of silhouette portraits. While this gorgeous gift volume might look as if it's from the 1890s, its pages contain today's favourite cult characters from movies, TV, comics and videogames.

Arthur Jeffress was an art dealer and collector from a Virginian family who bequeathed his "subversive little collection" (Derek Hill) to Tate and Southampton City Art Gallery on his suicide in 1961. That suicide, a result of his expulsion from Venice, has been the subject of speculation in many memoirs. Gill Hedley's biography of Jeffress has benefited from access to many hundreds of unpublished letters written between Jeffress and Robert Melville, who ran Jeffress' own gallery from 1955-1961. The letters were written largely while Jeffress was in Venice and reveal a vivid picture of the London gallery world as well as frank details of artists, collectors and the definitive story of his suicide. Previously unpublished research reveals new information about the lives of Jeffress' lover John Deakin, his business partner Erica Brausen, the French photographer Andre Ostier and Henry Clifford, and the way in which all of them influenced Jeffress' first steps as a collector from the 1930s onwards.

While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TV maps and condenses a comprehensive history of the relationships of art and television. With a particular focus on the link between reality and representation, Francesco Spampinato analyzes video art works, installations, performances, interventions and television programs made by contemporary artists as forms of resistance to and appropriation and parody of mainstream television. The artists discussed belong to different generations: those that emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and Happening; and those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; to those arriving in the 2000s, an era in which, through reality shows and the Internet, anybody could potentially become a media personality; and finally those active in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace. These works and phenomena elicit a tension between art and television, exposing an incongruence; an impossibility not only to converge but at the very least to open up a dialogical exchange.

Published on the occasion of the Liverpool Biennial 2012, this book addresses the theme of the exhibition: notions of hospitality. Hospitality is the welcome we extend to strangers, an attitude and a code of conduct, as well as a metaphor that encompasses issues of the body, territory, geopolitics, ecology, trade and the hosting of data. In this era of unprecedented movement of both people and knowledge, different cultures of hospitality jostle for space as never before. Where lies the threshold between host and guest, if there is one at all, and who has the power to decide? How does our view of hospitality change when seen through the lens of time? The ethics underlying these questions are shaped by traditions that date back to the classical world and the ancient cultures of central Asia and the Indian sub-continent. In more recent times, philosophers from Kant to Derrida have provided influential comment on the subject, establishing the terms of a discourse that now spans myriad disciplines, among them anthropology, sociology, economics, philosophy, theology, politics and art. Responding to this growing academic and cultural interest, The Unexpected Guest is the first publication to bring together an anthology of key historical and contemporary texts with new contributions by writers from a variety of fields, alongside artists' responses commissioned especially for the book. Uniquely, it introduces time as a window onto hospitality, offering fresh perspectives and new thinking on the issue.

Gary Indiana's collected columns of art criticism from the Village Voice, documenting, from the front lines, the 1980s New York art scene. In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the windows. At times, the only tangible perk was having the chump for a fifth of vodka whenever twenty more phonies had flattered my ass off in the course of a working week. -from Vile Days From March 1985 through June 1988 in The Village Voice, Gary Indiana reimagined the weekly art column. Thirty years later, Vile Days brings together for the first time all of those vivid dispatches, too long stuck in archival limbo, so that the fire of Indiana's observations can burn again. In the midst of Reaganism, the grim toll of AIDS, and the frequent jingoism of postmodern theory, Indiana found a way to be the moment's Baudelaire. He turned the art review into a chronicle of life under siege. As a critic, Indiana combines his novelistic and theatrical gifts with a startling political acumen to assess art and the unruly environments that give it context. No one was better positioned to elucidate the work of key artists at crucial junctures of their early careers, from Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince to Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, among others. But Indiana also remained alert to the aesthetic consequence of sumo wrestling, flower shows, public art, corporate galleries, and furniture design. Edited and prefaced by Bruce Hainley, Vile Days provides an opportunity to track Indiana's emergence as one of the most prescient writers of his generation.

Soul Mates takes a serious and ironic look at popular icons in western American culture--cowboy boots and masterpieces in western art--to explore American cultural values and pervasive themes in twentieth century art. Cowboy boots are examined as markers of western life, as works of art, and subjects of works of art. The author has selected stellar examples of boots made by skilled and famous boot makers, including Lucchese, Tony Lama, and C. C. McGuffin, to offer a counterpoint to the "fine art" more typically considered. He has also selected drawings, paintings, prints, and photographs that reflect the changing attitudes and perceptions of western culture over the past 50 years and raise conceptual issues about western mores and modern life. Featured are works by Barbara Van Cleve, Frederick Hammersley, Bruce Nauman, Hal West, Luis A. Jimenez, Jr., and many others whose art define and redefine aspects of Western mythology and culture. The text examines the contemporary art forms that shape the current representation of the cowboy and the West in modern life and explores the origins of cowboy imagery; the isolation of ranch life; the non-traditional roles of female cobblers; and the depictions of boot wearers (both male and female) as powerful, sexual, and independent. Soul Mates is published to coincide with an exhibition to open at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico in May 2010.

The first comprehensive collection of the words and works of a movement-defining artist. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

A complex and elusive artist, Gino De Dominicis is considered one of the key figures in contemporary Italian art and a reference point for both the artists of his time and younger generations. Gino De Dominicis' life has always been shrouded in mystery. He chose to stay outside the sphere of media attention and due to this intransigent position no catalogs or books on his works were published. The work entitled "Seconda soluzione di immortalita. L'universo e immobile," presented at the Venice Art Biennale in 1972, was remembered however: Gino de Dominicis faced charges for having exhibited a young man with Down's Syndrome as an art object. The absolute originality of much of his intuition has anticipated artistic experiences that came to fruit in the 21st century. The catalog, edited by Italo Tomassoni, brings together more than 700 artworks, each one accompanied by a dossier which, alongside the usual technical, chronological and bibliographic data, provides information regarding the context and circumstances that led to the work's creation.The volume also includes a section devoted to the artist's writings, a critical anthology and a catalogue raisonne of his works. The book concludes with appendices reproducing rare and unpublished documents dealing with the artist's life, a complete list of his solo exhibitions, his participation in group shows and an extensive bibliography.