The first single-volume anthology of Brecht's writings on both art and politics This volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.

In More Than Meets the Eye, Georgina Kleege explores the ways that ideas about visual art and blindness are linked in many facets of the culture. While it may seem paradoxical to link blindness to visual art, western theories about art have always been haunted by the specter of blindness. The ideal art viewer is typically represented as possessing perfect vision, an encyclopedic knowledge of art, and a photographic memory of images, all which allow for an unmediated wordless communion with the work of art. This ideal viewer is defined in polar opposition to a blind person, presumed to be oblivious to the power of art, and without the cognitive capacity to draw on analogous experience. Kleege begins her study with four chapters about traditional representations of blindness, arguing that traditional theories of blindness fail to take into account the presence of other senses, or the ability of blind people to draw analogies from non-visual experience to develop concepts about visual phenomena. She then shifts focus from the tactile to the verbal, beginning with Denis Diderot's remarkable range of techniques to describe art works for readers who were not present to view them for themselves, and how his criticism offers a powerful warrant for bringing the specter of blindness out of the shadows and into the foreground of visual experience. Through both personal experience and scholarly treatment, Kleege dismantles the traditional denigration of blindness, contesting the notion that viewing art involves sight alone and challenging traditional understandings of blindness through close reading of scientific case studies and literary depictions. More Than Meets the Eye introduces blind and visually impaired artists whose work has shattered stereotypes and opened up new aesthetic possibilities for everyone.

By the time you read this book, the art world may have witnessed the sale of its first $500 million painting. Whilst for some people money is anathema to art this is clearly a wealthy international industry, and a market with its own conventions and pressures. Drawing on the vast experience of Sotheby's Institute of Art, The Art Business exposes the realities of the commercial trade in fine art and antiques. Attention is devoted to the role of auction houses, commercial galleries and art museums as key institutions, with the text divided into four thematic sections covering: technical and structural elements of the art market cultural policy and management in art business regulatory legal and ethical issues in the art world the views, through interviews, of leading art market experts. This book provides a thorough examination of contemporary issues in the art business, and the mechanisms and influences which underpin its evolution. It is essential reading for students of art history or international business, or anyone with an interest in pursuing a career in this area.

WELCOME TO LAWBRANDAuroboros: Coils of the Serpent is a 5E campaign setting by Chris Metzen and Warchief Gaming. The first release in this universe, Worldbook: Lawbrand, is based on the roleplaying campaign that Chris ran with his childhood friends in the eighties and nineties, before heading to Blizzard to work on worlds such as Warcraft, StarCraft, and more.As a 5E compatible source book, Worldbook: Lawbrand gives players and GMs all the tools they'll need to create their own adventures in this epic fantasy world.Containing over a hundred pages of lore, as well as being loaded to the brim with new options for character customization, Worldbook: Lawbrand also features a comprehensive Adventures section, designed to give GMs a way to launch imaginative adventures for their party.Key Features: - Background and lore for each Trade-City, faction, and key players that run them.- Four brand new sub-classes and five new races unique to the setting, as well as new magic items, spells, and magical tattoos known as sigils.- Guides and recommendations on how to run adventures in Lawbrand, including creating compelling stories, using the Mark of the Serpent in your party, and more.Will you tame the world - or shatter it?

Most of our expereince is visual. We obtain most of our information and knowledge through sight, whether from reading books and newspapers, from watching television or from quickly glimpsing road signs. Many of our judgements and decisions, concerning where we live, what we shall drive and sit on and what we wear, are based on what places, cars, furniture and clothes look like. Much of our entertainment and recreation is visual, whether we visit art galleries, cinemas or read comics. This book concerns that visual experience. Why do we have the visual experiences we have? Why do the buildings, cars, products and advertisements we see look the way they do? How are we to explain the existence of different styles of paintings, different types of cars and different genres of film? How are we to explain the existence of different visual cultures? This book begins to answer these questions by explaining visual experience in terms of visual culture. The strengths and weaknesses of traditional means of analysing and explaining visual culture are examined and assessed. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary examples, it is argued that the groups which artists and designers form, the audiences and markets which they sell to, and the different social classes which are produced and reproduced by art and design are all part of the successful explanation and critical evaluation of visual culture.

Using examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the place and significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces - such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway - have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, the book also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space.

Smile, lift up your Voices. Life is your Play. Wander around on the stage of Life and Learn. LEARN is the fifth book by the secular philosopher bill thompson after SMILE, VOICES, PLAY, WANDER, and now LEARN. The book is for those who have had enough of Homo Sapiens and are turning to Homo Conatus who is always waiting in the wings of the greek theatres of words. Homo Conatus, wanting to exist and enhance the SELF. Individuals needing a progressive politics, a shared EARTH in order to flourish safely. This requires DEPTH, an existential that and how. A basic understanding of biology and cosmology on top of any old sapient understandings of space and time machines. This new understanding that Homo Conatus requires turns Freudianism upside down and microcosmic. Hysteria is normal. Boring is normal. In between is Play. This new deal for the children of the 21st Century has been researched by the Greeks [Aristotle], Romans [Cicero], Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton [not as a mechanics but] as the complexity that surpasses the understandings of the older Homo Sapiens because of quantum electrodynamics or chemistry for short. Quantum Dynamic Homeostasis. So Darwin and then secular universities around the world for our teleonomic developments, new technologies. Any chances of a maintaining a civil order whilst opening up to diverse opinionsa has to change gear from sapiens to Conatus and embrace the teleonomics of the modern synthesis [1958]. Not a lot of people know enough about this yet, and Learn is the fifth a introduction to Homo Conatusa by the secular philosopher bill thompson [who is still trying to work out what it is like to be human]. And is that not what you do on a daily basis?