Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history, this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in the historiography of the discipline. The chapters assess the strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of art, and consider the larger issue of the place of comparative in how art history may develop in the future. The contributors represent a comprehensive range of period and geographic command from antiquity to modernity, from China and Islam to Europe, from various forms of art history to archaeology, anthropology and material culture studies. Art history is less a single discipline than a series of divergent scholarly fields - in very different historical, geographic and cultural contexts - but all with a visual emphasis on the close examination of objects. These fields focus on different, often incompatible temporal and cultural contexts, yet nonetheless they regard themselves as one coherent discipline - namely the history of art. There are substantive problems in how the sub-fields within the broad-brush generalization called 'art history' can speak coherently to each other. These are more urgent since the shift from an art history centered on the western tradition to one that is consciously global.

In the 1970s, Lucy R. Lippard, author of the highly original and popular Mixed Blessings, merged her art-world concerns with those of the then-fledgling women’s movement. In a career that spans sixteen books and scores of articles, catalogs, and essays on art, political activism, feminism, and multiculturalism, her engaging and provocative writings have heralded a new way of thinking about art and its role in the feminist movement. This new collection of previously published essays covers more than two decades of Lippard’s thinking on the ever-evolving definitions of feminist art, the convergence of high and low art, political and activist art, and the contributions of feminist theory to the politics of identity that infuses the production and exhibition of much of today’s fine and popular art. With a new introduction from the author, The Pink Glass Swan brings together selections from two of Lippard’s leading works, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Art and Get the Message?: A Decade of Art for Social Change, and numerous other articles written for newspapers, magazines, and art catalogs across the country.

Emerging Landscapes brings together scholars and practitioners working in a wide range of disciplines within the fields of the built environment and visual arts to explore landscape as an idea, an image, and a material practice in an increasingly globalized world. Drawing on the synergies between the fields of architecture and photography, this collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining practice-based research with scholarly essays. It explores and critically reassesses the interface between representation - the imaginary and symbolic shaping of the human environment - and production - the physical and material changes wrought on the land. At a time of environmental crisis and the 'end of nature, 'shifting geopolitical boundaries and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes reflects on the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping landscape.

Theodor Adorno's famous aesthetic theory was not merely a theory of the aesthetic; it also made a wider claim about the aesthetic implications of all theory. At the same time we have to deal with aesthetic objects and events in which an aesthetic theory is inherent, which show themselves as art. From both sides--theory and aesthetics--a link can be made to the etymological meaning of theoria, which understands the theoretical as a seeing or perspective. Featuring lucid essays by major thinkers, the book examines this link, focusing equally on the aesthetic implications of theory and the theoretical implications of aesthetic events.

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.

Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse is an intellectual history of design and its role in configuring the modern Norwegian nation state. Rather than a conventional national design history survey that focuses on designers and objects, this is an in-depth study of the ideologies, organizations, strategies and politics that combined might be said to have "designed" the modern nation's material and visual culture. The book analyses main tropes and threads in the design discourse generated around key institutions such as museums, organisations and magazines. Beginning with how British and continental design reform ideas were mediated in Norway and merged with a nationalist sentiment in the late nineteenth century, Designing Modern Norway traces the tireless and wide-ranging work undertaken by enthusiastic and highly committed design professionals throughout the twentieth century to simultaneously modernise the nation by design and to nationalise modern design. Bringing the discussion up towards the present, the book concludes with an examination of how Norway's new-found wealth has profoundly changed the production, mediation and consumption of design.

Compiled for the first time here, essays by American critic, artist, gallerist and dealer John Kelsey convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates. "When the critic chooses to become a smuggler, a hack, a cook, or an artist," Kelsey said, "it's maybe because criticism as such remains tied to an outmoded social relation." Kelsey's "rich texts" play the double role of explaining the art world and actively participating in it; they close the distance between the work of art and how we talk about it. These playful, elegant writings - many originally published in Artforum - embody a timelessness that strikes at the core of the contemporary art world. The newest edition from the terrific Institut fur Kunstkritik series.

Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in-and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas. With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay "The Herd of Independent Minds." An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken brings to life with vivid accounts from Rosenberg's life. Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg's brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Miroslaw Balka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for 'archival' media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist.

First published in 1977, this book presents a comprehensive and lucid guide through the labyrinths of semiology and structuralism - perhaps the most significant systems of study to have been developed in the twentieth century. The authors describe the early presuppositions of structuralism and semiology which claim to be a materialist theory of language based on Saussure's notion of the sign. They show how these presuppositions have been challenged by work following Althusser's development of the Marxist theory of ideology, and by Lacan's re-reading of Freud. The book explains how the encounter of two disciplines - psychoanalysis and Marxism - on the ground of their common problem -language - has produced a new understanding of society and its subjects. It produces a critical re-examination of the traditional Marxist theory of ideology, together with the concepts of sign and identity of the subject.

This succinct book articulates a clear framework for remixing in drawing at intermediate and advanced levels. It begins by walking through the ideas of copyright and fair use, providing context, examples, and advice. Mueller directs students through building a collection of sources and influences, leading to the development and analysis of style. With a full chapter on techniques, including approaches to brainstorming, critique, and reflection, this book features over 50 exercises that are easily adapted to various approaches, media, and technologies as necessary. Two sample syllabi are included for both a semester and a quarter system.

Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, fourth edition, contains a selection of ninety-six readings organized by individual art forms as well as a final section of readings in philosophical aesthetics that cover multiple art forms. Sections include topics that are familiar to students such as painting, photography and movies, architecture, music, literature, and performance, as well as contemporary subjects such as mass art, popular arts, the aesthetics of the everyday, and the natural environment. Essays are drawn from both the analytic and continental traditions, and multiple others that bridge this divide between these traditions. Throughout, readings are brief, accessible for undergraduates, and conceptually focused, allowing instructors many different syllabi possibilities using only this single volume. Key Additions to the Fourth Edition The fourth edition is expanded to include a total of ninety-six essays with nineteen new essays (nine of them written exclusively for this volume), updated organization into new sections, revised introductions to each section, an increased emphasis on contemporary topics, such as stand-up comedy, the architecture of museums, interactivity and video games, the ethics of sexiness, trans/gendered beauty, the aesthetics of junkyards and street art, pornography, and the inclusion of more diverse philosophical voices. Nevertheless, this edition does not neglect classic writers in the traditional aesthetics: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Collingwood, Bell, and writers of similar status in aesthetics. The philosophers writing new chapters exclusively for this fourth edition are: * Sondra Bacharach on street art * Aili Bresnahan on appreciating dance * Hina Jamelle on digital architecture * Jason Leddington on magic * Sheila Lintott on stand-up comedy * Yuriko Saito on everyday aesthetics * Larry Shiner on art spectacle museums in the twenty-first century * Peg Brand Weiser on how beauty matters * Edward Winters on the feeling of being at home in vernacular architecture, as in such urban places as bars.

An intimate, revealing biography of a talented artist who lived life on her own terms.   Pablo Picasso called Françoise Gilot “The Woman Who Says No.� Talented, and feisty, and an accomplished artist in her own right, Gilot left Picasso after a ten-year relationship, the only woman to escape his intense attentions unscathed. From 2012 to 2014, German journalist and author Malte Herwig dropped by her ateliers in Paris and New York to chat with her about life, love, and art. She shared trenchant observations, her sharp sense of humor, and over ninety years of experience, much of it in the company of men who changed the world: Picasso, Matisse, and her second husband, the famous virologist Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. Never one to stand in the shadows, Gilot engaged with ground-breaking artists and scientists on her own terms, creating from these vital interactions an artistic style all her own, translated into an enormous collection of paintings and drawings held by private collectors and public museums around the world. In her early nineties, she generously shared her hospitality and wisdom with Herwig, who started out as an interviewer but found himself drawn into the role of pupil as Gilot, whom he called “a philosopher of joy,� shared with him different ways of seeing the world.

Robert Desnos remains celebrated today as one of France's most famous surrealist artists and as a hero and martyr of the French Resistance. Robert Desnos and the Play of Popular Culture sheds new light onto both of these facets of his persona and uncovers the fundamental connections between them by analyzing the poet's long-standing commitment to the public domain and his involvement with popular media during the 1930s and 1940s. Through analysis of Desnos's regular contributions to the sensationalist 1930s-era magazine Voila, this study begins with consideration of Desnos's turn to popular commercial media after his break with Andre Breton. The study then turns to Desnos's continued engagement with the public sphere of artistic expression under the Occupation and analyzes Bonsoir mesdames, bonsoir messieurs, the 1944 film that Desnos co-authored with Henri Jeanson, which was released in Parisian theatres just one week before Desnos's arrest and deportation for resistance activities. Exploration of these intriguing but surprisingly little-known facets of his artistic production demonstrates that Desnos, far from abandoning his prewar fascination with the power of popular media, sustained and deepened his engagement with public culture as a space of contestation where the interplay of public and private, producer and consumer, intersects with the cultural politics of wartime France. The book includes the full text of Desnos's eleven articles for Voila, which have never been previously collected, with accompanying English translations.

Deftly deploying Derrida's notion of the 'unexperienced experience' and building on Paul Virilio's ideas about the aesthetics of disappearance, Vanishing Points explores the aesthetic character of presence and absence as articulated in contemporary art, photography, film and emerging media. Addressing works ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Six Feet Under, Natasha Chuk emphasizes the notion that art is an accident, an event, which registers numerous overlapping, contradictory orientations, or vanishing points, between its own components and the viewers' perspective - generating the power to create unexperienced experiences. This volume will be a must read for anyone interested in contemporary art and its intersection with philosophy.

In the digital age, photography confronts its future under the competing signs of ubiquity and obsolescence. While technology allows amateurs and experts alike to create high-quality photographs, new electronic formats have severed the photochemical link between image and subject. At the same time, cinematic, staged, or digitally enhanced art styles stretch the concept of photography and raise questions about its truth value. Despite this ambiguity, photography remains a stubbornly substantive form of evidence. Referenced by artists, filmmakers, and writers as a powerful emblem of truth, photography has found its home in other media at the moment of its own material demise. By examining the medium as articulated in literature, film, and the graphic novel, Daguerreotypes demonstrates how photography secures identity for figures with an unstable sense of self. From Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz to Alison Bechdel's Fun Home - we find traces of these "fugitive subjects" throughout contemporary culture. Ultimately, Daguerreotypes reveals how the photograph has inspired a range of modern artistic and critical practices.

Surveying some 20 years of Swiss video art, this book includes works by Alexander Hahn, Klara Kuchta, Eric Lanz, Jean Otth, Pipilotti Rist, Alex Silber and Hannes Vogel, it reviews discussion surrounding the exhibiting of video art and the problems associated with long-term conservation.

Protecting, healing, or punishing-people of various eras and origins have attributed such powers to the sculptures that are being presented together here for the first time: be it the sculpture of the Mangaaka from what is today the Republic of Congo, the protective goddess Mahamayuri from China, or the Maria on the globe from Southern Germany. Forty-five objects created between the fourth and the nineteenth century from two museums in Berlin provide a vivid testimony to the ever-present need for protection and orientation when dealing with individual or social crises. They represent the existence of an invisible world of gods, spirits, or ancestors, and create a connection between this world and a "different reality." As a result of how they are presented in museums, their context of use is, however, often lost-a situation that is reflected on by the authors of this book.

Illustrated with Barbara Hepworth's abstract stone carving, with other works of art, and with fascinating vignettes from Adrian Stokes's writing, this biography highlights his revolutionary emphasis on the materials-led inspiration of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the avant-garde creations of the Ballets Russes. In also detailing Stokes's role as catalyst of the transformation of St Ives in Cornwall into an internationally-acclaimed centre of modern art, and his falling in love again in his early forties, this biography shows how Stokes used all these experiences, together with his many years of psychoanalytic treatment by Melanie Klein, in forging insights about ways the outer world gives form to the inner world of fantasy and imagination.

Kristine Stiles has played a vital role in establishing trauma studies within the humanities. A formidable force in the art world, Stiles examines the significance of traumatic experiences both in the individual lives and works of artists and in contemporary international cultures since World War II. In Concerning Consequences, she considers some of the most notorious art of the second half of the twentieth century by artists who use their bodies to address destruction and violence. The essays in this book focus primarily on performance art and photography. From war and environmental pollution to racism and sexual assault, Stiles analyzes the consequences of trauma as seen in the works of artists like Marina Abramovic, Pope.L, and Chris Burden. Assembling rich intellectual explorations on everything from Paleolithic paintings to the Bible's patriarchal legacies to documentary images of nuclear explosions, Concerning Consequences explores how art can provide a distinctive means of understanding trauma and promote individual and collective healing.

This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora. In the book, Myron Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others' specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony Patterson, and Dianne Smith. The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass media This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media. Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik, renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that while the face plays a critical role in human communication, it defies attempts at visual representation. Belting divides his book into three parts: faces as masks of the self, portraiture as a constantly evolving mask in Western culture, and the fate of the face in the age of mass media. Referencing a vast array of sources, Belting's insights draw on art history, philosophy, theories of visual culture, and cognitive science. He demonstrates that Western efforts to portray the face have repeatedly failed, even with the developments of new media such as photography and film, which promise ever-greater degrees of verisimilitude. In spite of sitting at the heart of human expression, the face resists possession, and creative endeavors to capture it inevitably result in masks--hollow signifiers of the humanity they're meant to embody. From creations by Van Eyck and August Sander to works by Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, and Chuck Close, Face and Mask takes a remarkable look at how, through the centuries, the physical visage has inspired and evaded artistic interpretation.

Pictorial representation is one of the core questions in aesthetics and philosophy of art. What is a picture? How do pictures represent things? This collection of specially commissioned chapters examines the influential thesis that the core of pictorial representation is not resemblance but 'seeing-in', in particular as found in the work of Richard Wollheim. We can see a passing cloud as a rabbit, but we also see a rabbit in the clouds. 'Seeing-in' is an imaginative act of the kind employed by Leonardo's pupils when he told them to see what they could - for example, battle scenes - in a wall of cracked plaster. This collection examines the idea of 'seeing-in' as it appears primarily in the work of Wollheim but also its origins in the work of Wittgenstein. An international roster of contributors examine topics such as the contrast between seeing-in and seeing-as; whether or in what sense Wollheim can be thought of as borrowing from Wittgenstein; the idea that all perception is conceptual or propositional; the metaphor of figure and ground and its relation to the notion of 'two-foldedness'; the importance in art of emotion and the imagination. Wollheim, Wittgenstein and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in is essential reading for students and scholars of aesthetics and philosophy of art, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as philosophy of mind and art theory.

This book explores the collaborations, during the mid-20th century, between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Between 1948 and 1962 the two institutions collaborated on three book projects-The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures (1948-1957), The Metropolitan Seminars in Art (1958-60), and a print reproduction of Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1962)-bringing art from the Met's collections right into the homes of subscribers. The Met and the Masses places these commercial enterprises in a variety of contemporary and historical contexts, including the relation of cultural education to democracy in America, the history of the Met as an educational institution, the rise of art education in postwar America, and the concurrent transformation of the home into a space that mediated familial privacy and the public sphere. Using never before published archival material, the book demonstrates how the Met sought to bring art to the masses in postwar America, whilst upholding its reputation as an institution of high culture. It is essential reading for scholars, researchers and curators interested in the history of modern art, museum and curatorial studies, arts and cultural management, heritage studies, as well as the history of art publications.