In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We're often told that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

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.

The artist Mark Hearld finds his inspiration in the flora and fauna of the British countryside: a blue-eyed jay perched on an oak branch; two hares enjoying the spoils of an allotment; a mute swan standing at the frozen water's edge; and a sleek red fox prowling the fields. Hearld admires such twentieth-century artists as Edward Bawden, John Piper, Eric Ravilious and Enid Marx, and, like them, he chooses to work in a range of media - paint, print, collage, textiles and ceramics. Work Book is the first collection of Hearld's beguiling art. The works are grouped into nature-related themes introduced by Hearld, who narrates the story behind some of his creations and discusses his influences. He explains his particular love of collage, which he favours for its graphic quality and potential for strong composition. Art historian Simon Martin contributes an essay on Hearld's place in the English popular-art tradition, and also meets Hearld in his museum-like home to explore the artist's passion for collecting objects, his working methods and his startling ability to view the wonders of the natural world as if through a child's eyes.

This book provides an informal biography of the wunderkind who became one of America's greatest living artists and most well-known architects. Many are familiar with the art and architectural design work of Maya Lin, but the compelling details of her personal background are less well known. This book not only focuses upon Lin's substantial achievements throughout her life, but also presents Maya Lin's "prehistory," describing family events in China that led to her parents' flight to the United States. Author Donald Langmead guides readers through Lin's ancestry and family connections in precommunist China; her childhood and youth in Athens, Ohio; the story behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; her career after 1982 (by decades); and emphasis on environmental conservation. Written for a young adult and general readership, Maya Lin: A Biography provides an up-to-date description of how she became one of the most famous and respected artists in America. Provides a timeline of Maya Lin's significant life events, artworks, and exhibitions Includes various photographs to accompany the text Contains a bibliography organized by types of sources, including writings by Maya Lin, books, monographs and catalogues, transcripts of interviews, and videos Includes an index of important people and artworks

Melanie Smith: Farce and Artifice is the publication that takes up the idea of the exhibition organised by the MACBA, jointly with the MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo and UNAM, in Mexico City, and the Museo Amparo, in Puebla, Mexico. It is the largest organised to date in Europe about the work of an artist who defies easy classification, born in England (Poole, 1965) but active on the Mexican art scene since the nineties.