Fifty Key Texts in Art History is an anthology of critical commentaries selected from the classical period to the late modern. It explores some of the central and emerging themes, issues and debates within Art History as an increasingly expansive and globalised discipline. It features an international range of contributors , including art historians, artists, curators and gallerists. Arranged chronologically, each entry includes a bibliography for further reading and a key word index for easy reference. Text selections range across issues including artistic value, cultural identity, modernism, gender, psychoanalysis, photographic theory, poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock Old Mistresses, Women, Art & Ideology (1981) Victor Burgin's The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (1986) Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture: Hybridity, Liminal Spaces and Borders (1994) Geeta Kapur When was Modernism in Indian Art? (1995) Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1999) Georges Didi Huberman Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (2004)

`Sound Art` is the catalogue that accompanies a new exhibition at the Fundacio Juan Miro Gallery in Barcelona. It offers a critical interrogation of this category in art and presents an overview of the sonorisation of the art object from the later C19 to today. The exhibition examines how, in the late C19 and early C20 many visual artists worked references to sound and music into their pieces using a variety of strategies. In turn, it also addresses the influence of visual arts on contemporary musical practices. It considers how several composers and visual artists turned the music score into a space for experimentation and performativity, and explains how the introduction of sound enables art objects to state their presence in a radically different, augmented way. In the text of this book, the experimental musician and artist Max Neuhaus questions the validity of the term `Sound Art` and so creates the starting point for the various artists and critics who also contribute to the discussion, including Suzanne Delehanty, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Maija Julius and Miki Yui, David Toop, Fiona McGovern, Ursula and Rene Block and Arnau Horta, who is the curator the exhibition and editor of this book.

This book analyzes art criticism on Abstract Expressionism, lauded as "the triumph of American painting." It traces the ways in which the movement's meaning has been construed and constructed in reference to the changing cultural and political framework. Starting from the purely formal analyses of the 1950s and early 1960s, through the radical political statements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, until the later interpretations inspired mainly by gender and postcolonial studies, this book cuts across the domains of politics, philosophy and art criticism. The question of whether Abstract Expressionism was a "path to the Absolute" or a "weapon of the Cold War" is inscribed into the larger debate concerning the links between culture and politics.

This is a long-awaited reissue of Jerrold Levinson's 1990 book Music, Art, and Metaphysics, which gathers together the writings that made him a leading figure in contemporary aesthetics. Most of the essays are distinguished by a concern with metaphysical questions about artworks and their properties, but other essays address the problem of art's definition, the psychology of aesthetic response, and the logic of interpreting and evaluating works of art. The focus of about half of the essays is the art of music, the art of greatest interest to Levinson throughout his career. Many of the essays have been very influential, being among the most cited in contemporary aesthetics and having become essential references in debates on the definition of art, the ontology of art, emotional response to art, expression in art, and the nature of art forms.

Debates over the 'end of art' have tended to obscure Hegel's work on the arts themselves. Benjamin Rutter opens this study with a defence of art's indispensability to Hegel's conception of modernity; he then seeks to reorient discussion toward the distinctive values of painting, poetry, and the novel. Working carefully through Hegel's four lecture series on aesthetics, he identifies the expressive possibilities particular to each medium. Thus, Dutch genre scenes animate the everyday with an appearance of vitality; metaphor frees language from prose; and Goethe's lyrics revive the banal routines of love with imagination and wit. Rutter's important study reconstructs Hegel's view not only of modern art but of modern life and will appeal to philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians alike.

Work and Object is a study of fundamental questions in the metaphysics of art, notably how works relate to the materials that constitute them. Issues about the creation of works, what is essential and inessential to their identity, their distinct kinds of properties, including aesthetic properties, their amenability to interpretation, their style, the conditions under which they can go out of existence, and their relation to perceptually indistinguishable doubles (e.g. forgeries and parodies), are raised and debated. A core theme is that works like paintings, music, literature, sculpture, architecture, films, photographs, multi-media installations, and many more besides, have fundamental features in common, as cultural artefacts, in spite of enormous surface differences. It is their nature as distinct kinds of things, grounded in distinct ontological categories, that is the subject of this enquiry. Although much of the discussion is abstract, based in analytical metaphysics, there are numerous specific applications, including a study of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausee and recent conceptual art. Some surprising conclusions are derived, about the identity conditions of works and about the difference, often, between what a work seems to be and what it really is.

If an artist sends a live peacock to an exhibition, is it art?
'What is art?' is a question many of us want answered but are too afraid to ask. It is the very question that Nigel Warburton demystifies in this brilliant and accessible little book. With the help of varied illustrations and photographs, from Cézanne and Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, best-selling author Warburton brings a philosopher's eye to art in a refreshing jargon-free style.
With customary clarity, he explains art theories, that are much discussed but little understood, by thinkers such as Clive Bell, R.G Collingwood and Wittgenstein. He illuminates other perplexing problems in art, such as the artist's intention, representation and emotion. Drawing on photographs of Cindy Sherman and Tiananmen Square, Warburton shows that, if we are ever to answer the art question, we must consider each work of art on its own terms.

A stimulating and handy guide through the art maze, The Art Question is essential reading for anyone interested in art, philosophy or those who simply like looking at and thinking about pictures.

In Germany, 1969, Eugen Fink's Fashion: Seductive Play was published. This first English language edition, updated with an introduction by Stefano Marino and Giovanni Matteucci, makes available Fink’s philosophical investigation into fashion to an English-speaking audience. One of the greatest figures in the “phenomenological movement,� Fink here investigates fashion at various philosophical levels - aesthetic, ethical, social - and in relationship to other forms of human culture, especially contemporary culture. Although there have been many transformations and changes in the world of fashion since the late 1960s, from prêt-à-porter to fast fashion, fashion’s connection to both high culture and popular culture, and the new relationship between fashion and the advent of social media, Fink’s insights allow wide-ranging and far-reaching inquiries into fashion's philosophical essence. Fink's extraordinary lucidity and his unique conceptual capacities have made his work crucial to the study of the philosophy of fashion today. His work, like that of Simmel’s, Veblen’s or Benjamin’s, is as essential and important now as when it was first published.

Philosophy of art is traditionally concerned with the definition, appreciation and value of art. Through a close examination of art from recent centuries, Art and Phenomenology is one of the first books to explore visual art as a mode of experiencing the world itself, showing how in the words of Merleau-Ponty Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own .

An outstanding series of chapters by an international group of contributors examine the following questions:

• Paul Klee and the body in art
• colour and background in Merleau-Ponty 's phenomenology of art
• self-consciousness and seventeenth-century painting
• Vermeer and Heidegger
• philosophy and the painting of Rothko
• embodiment in Renaissance art
• sculpture, dance and phenomenology.

Art and Phenomenology is essential reading for anyone interested in phenomenology, aesthetics, and visual culture.

Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of Marxist philosophy and art history. A significant influence on Lukacs, and the dedicatee of his The Young Hegel, as well as an unsurpassed scholar of Marx and Engels's writings on art and a lifelong controversialist, Lifshitz's work dealt with topics as various as the philosophy of Marx and the pop aesthetics of Andy Warhol. The Crisis of Ugliness (originally published in Russian by Iskusstvo, 1968), published here in English for the first time, presented with a detailed introduction by its translator David Riff, is a compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics. Its reentry into English debates on the history of Soviet aesthetics promises to re-orient our sense of the basic coordinates of a Marxist art theory.

Postwar Italian Art History Today brings fresh critical consideration to the parameters and impact of Italian art and visual culture studies of the past several decades. Taking its cue from the thirty-year anniversary of curator Germano Celant's landmark exhibition at PS1 in New York - The Knot - this volume presents innovative case studies and emphasizes new methodologies deployed in the study of postwar Italian art as a means to evaluate the current state of the field. Included are fifteen essays that each examine, from a different viewpoint, the issues, concerns, and questions driving postwar Italian art history. The editors and contributors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of postwar Italian art, the terminology that is used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art in Italy and abroad.

While written sources on the history of Greece have been studied extensively, no systematic attempt has been made to examine photography as an important cultural and material process. This is surprising, given that Modern Greece and photography are almost peers: both are cultural products of the 1830s, and both actively converse with modernity. Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities fills this lacuna. It is the first inter-disciplinary volume to examine critically and in a theorised manner the entanglement of Greece with photography. The book argues that photographs and the photographic process as a whole have been instrumental in the reproduction of national imagination, in the consolidation of the nation-building process, and in the generation and dissemination of state propaganda. At the same time, it is argued that the photographic field constitutes a site of memory and counter-memory, where various social actors intervene actively and stake their discursive, material, and practical claims. As such, the volume will be of relevance to scholars and photographers, worldwide. The book is divided into four, tightly integrated parts. The first, 'Imag(in)ing Greece', shows that the consolidation of Greek national identity constituted a material-cum-representational process, the projection of an imagery, although some photographic production sits uneasily within the national canon, and may even undermine it. The second part, 'Photographic narratives, alternative histories', demonstrates the narrative function of photographs in diary-keeping and in photobooks. It also examines the constitution of spectatorship through the combination of text and image, and the role of photography as a process of materializing counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. The third part, 'Photographic matter-realities', foregrounds the role of photography in materializing state propaganda, national memory, and war. The final part, 'Photographic ethnographiesa

Between Art and Anthropology provides new and challenging arguments for considering contemporary art and anthropology in terms of fieldwork practice. Artists and anthropologists share a set of common practices that raise similar ethical issues, which the authors explore in depth for the first time. The book presents a strong argument for encouraging artists and anthropologists to learn directly from each other's practices 'in the field'. It goes beyond the so-called 'ethnographic turn' of much contemporary art and the 'crisis of representation' in anthropology, in productively exploring the implications of the new anthropology of the senses, and ethical issues, for future art-anthropology collaborations. The contributors to this exciting volume consider the work of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Suzanne Lacy, Marcus Coates, Cameron Jamie, and Mohini Chandra. With cutting-edge essays from a range of key thinkers such as acclaimed art critic Lucy R. Lippard, and distinguished anthropologists George E. Marcus and Steve Feld, Between Art and Anthropology will be essential reading for students, artists and scholars across a number of fields.

In recent years, neuroscientists have made ambitious attempts to explain artistic processes and spectatorship through brain imaging techniques. But can brain science really unravel the workings of art? Is the brain in fact the site of aesthetic appreciation? Embodying Art recasts the relationship between neuroscience and aesthetics and calls for shifting the focus of inquiry from the brain itself to personal experience in the world. Chiara Cappelletto presents close readings of neuroscientific and philosophical scholarship as well as artworks and art criticism, identifying their epistemological premises and theoretical consequences. She critiques neuroaesthetic reductionism and its assumptions about a mind/body divide, arguing that the brain is embodied and embedded in affective, cultural, and historical milieus. Cappelletto considers understandings of the human brain encompassing scientific, philosophical, and visual and performance arts discourses. She examines how neuroaesthetics has constructed its field of study, exploring the ways digital renderings and scientific data have been used to produce the brain as a cultural and visual object. Tracing the intertwined histories of brain science and aesthetic theory, Embodying Art offers a strikingly original and profound philosophical account of the human brain as a living artifact.

A provocative and challenging new conceptual framework for the study of images This book builds on the groundbreaking theoretical framework established in Whitney Davis's acclaimed previous book, A General Theory of Visual Culture, in which he shows how certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. Here, Davis uses revealing archaeological and historical case studies to further develop his theory, presenting an exacting new account of the interaction that occurs when a viewer looks at a picture. Davis argues that pictoriality--the depiction intended by its maker to be seen--emerges at a particular standpoint in space and time. Reconstruction of this standpoint is the first step of the art historian's craft. Because standpoints are inherently mutable and mobile, pictoriality constantly shifts in form and possible meaning. To capture this complexity, Davis develops new concepts of radical pictorial ambiguity, including "bivisibility" (the fact that pictures can always be seen in ways other than intended), pictorial naturalism, and the behavior of pictures under changing angles of view. He then applies these concepts to four cases--Paleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi. A profound new theory of the work of both makers and viewers by one of the discipline's most esteemed and engaged thinkers, Visuality and Virtuality is essential reading for art historians, architects, archaeologists, and philosophers of art and visual theory.

Why has jewellery and body adornment often been marginalized in studies of modernist art and design? This study explores the relationship between jewellery, modernism and modernity from the 'jazz age' to the second world war in order to challenge the view that these portable art forms have only a minor role to play in histories of modernism. From the masterworks of the Parisian jewellery houses to the film and photography of Man Ray, this study seeks to present jewellery in a new light, where issues of representation and display are considered to be as important in the creation of a modern 'jewellery culture' as the objects themselves. Drawing on material from museums, archives, contemporary journals, memoirs, literary and theoretical texts, this study shows how the emergence of modern jewellery began to seriously question conventional notions of body adornment.

Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these, which have dominated aesthetic theory since the Greeks, were debated with extraordinary vigour and ingenuity in eighteenth-century France. In this book Dr Hobson analyses these debates, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, poetry and music. In each case she relates theory to contemporary works of art by Watteau, Chardin, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Gluck and many others. She shows that disputes within the theory of each art centred upon the nature of the perceiver's attention. Dr Hobson provides a method of mapping the changes in artistic style which took place as the century advanced. In discussing such conceptual transformations Dr Hobson opens an important perspective for the study of Romanticism and Realism.

Art Is Not What You Think It Is utilizes original research to present a series of critical incursions into the current state of debate on the idea of art, making manifest what has been largely missing or unsaid in those discussions. * Links museology, history, theory, and criticism to the realities of contemporary social conditions and shows how they have structurally functioned in a variety of contexts * Deals with divisive and controversial problems such as blasphemy and idolatry, and the problem of artistic truth * Addresses relations between European notions about art and artifice and those developed in other and especially indigenous cultural traditions

Whether it was the demands of life, leisure, or a combination of both that forced our hands, we have developed a myriad of artifacts--maps, notes, descriptions, diagrams, flow-charts, photographs, paintings, and prints--that stand for other things. Most agree that images and their close relatives are special because, in some sense, they look like what they are about. This simple claim is the starting point for most philosophical investigations into the nature of depiction.
On Images, by contrast, argues that what it is to be a picture does not fundamentally concern how such representations can be perceived. What matters is not how we perceive representations but how they relate to one another. This kind of approach, first championed by Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art, has not found many supporters, in part because of weaknesses with Goodman's account. On Images shows that a properly crafted structural account of pictures has many advantages over the perceptual accounts that dominate the literature on this topic. In particular, it explains the close relationship between pictures, diagrams, graphs and other kinds of non-linguistic representation. Kulvicki undermines the claim that pictures are essentially visual by showing how many kinds of non-visual representations, including audio recordings and tactile line drawings, are genuinely pictorial. Part Two shows that the structural account of depiction can help to explain why pictures seem so perceptually special, rather than taking that fact for granted. Based on these results, Part Three provides a new account of pictorial realism.

On the trail of air, wind, and breath Wind moves - both things and human thought. The wind is also a harbinger both of new beginnings and of decay, of control and chaos, and the destructive force of the wind is central to the debate on climate change. The book Wenn der Wind weht / When the Wind Blows is being published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at KUNST HAUS WIEN, in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It presents more than twenty artistic projects that render the unseen elements air, wind, and breath visible in different ways. Ernst Strouhal traces (cultural) stories of the wind in his text "Flying Robert and His Kin," while curators Verena Kaspar-Eisert and Liddy Scheffknecht look at air as a medium in contemporary art. Publication to accompany the exhibition at KUNST HAUS WIEN (12/03-28/08/2022) Works by Hoda Afshar, Olafur Eliasson, Ulay / Marina Abramovic, and others With a conversation between historian/author Philipp Blom and climate researcher Helga Kromp-Kolb

The art of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) is usually viewed as quite distinct from Surrealism, a movement which the artist himself displayed some hostility towards. However, Rauschenberg had a very positive reception among Surrealists, particularly across the period 1959-69. In the face of Rauschenberg’s avowals of his own ‘literalism’ and insistence on his art as ‘facts,’ this book gathers generous evidence of the poetic, metaphorical, allusive, associative and connotative dimensions of the artist's oeuvre as identified by Surrealists, and thus extrapolates new readings from Rauschenberg's key works on that basis. By viewing Rauschenberg’s art against the expansion of the cultural influence of the United States in Europe in the period after the Second World War and the increasingly politicized activities of the Surrealists in the era of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism shows how poetic inference of the artist’s work was turned towards political interpretation. By analysing Rauschenberg’s art in the context of Surrealism, and drawing from it new interpretations and perspectives, this volume simultaneously situates the Surrealist movement in 1960s American art criticism and history.

Embodying the entire system of Robert Henri's teaching, The Art Spirit contains much valuable advice, critical comment, and inspiration to every student of the arts.

Over the past twenty-five years, photography has moved to centre-stage in the study of visual culture and has established itself in numerous disciplines. This trend has brought with it a diversification in approaches to the study of the photographic image.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots offers exciting perspectives on photography theory today from some of the world s leading critics and theorists. It introduces new means of looking at photographs, with topics including:

• a community-based understanding of Spencer Tunick s controversial installations
• the tactile and auditory dimensions of photographic viewing
• snapshot photography
• the use of photography in human rights discourse.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots also addresses the question of photography history, revisiting the work of some of the most influential theorists such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and the October group, re-evaluating the neglected genre of the carte-de-visite photograph, and addressing photography s wider role within the ideologies of modernity. The collection opens with an introduction by the editors, analyzing the trajectory of photography studies and theory over the past three decades and the ways in which the discipline has been constituted.

Ranging from the most personal to the most dehumanized uses of photography, from the nineteenth century to the present day, from Latin America to Northern Europe, Photography: Theoretical Snapshots will be of value to all those interested in photography, visual culture, and cultural history.

Over the past twenty-five years, photography has moved to centre-stage in the study of visual culture and has established itself in numerous disciplines. This trend has brought with it a diversification in approaches to the study of the photographic image.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots offers exciting perspectives on photography theory today from some of the world s leading critics and theorists. It introduces new means of looking at photographs, with topics including:

• a community-based understanding of Spencer Tunick s controversial installations
• the tactile and auditory dimensions of photographic viewing
• snapshot photography
• the use of photography in human rights discourse.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots also addresses the question of photography history, revisiting the work of some of the most influential theorists such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and the October group, re-evaluating the neglected genre of the carte-de-visite photograph, and addressing photography s wider role within the ideologies of modernity. The collection opens with an introduction by the editors, analyzing the trajectory of photography studies and theory over the past three decades and the ways in which the discipline has been constituted.

Ranging from the most personal to the most dehumanized uses of photography, from the nineteenth century to the present day, from Latin America to Northern Europe, Photography: Theoretical Snapshots will be of value to all those interested in photography, visual culture, and cultural history.