The near-absence of religion from contemporary discourse on art is one of the most fundamental issues in postmodernism. Artists critical of religion can find voices in the art world, but religion itself, including spirituality, is taken to be excluded by the very project of modernism. The sublime, "re-enchantment" (as in Weber), and the aura (as in Benjamin) have been used to smuggle religious concepts back into academic writing, but there is still no direct communication between "religionists" and scholars. Re-Enchantment, volume 7 in The Art Seminar Series, will be the first book to bridge that gap.

The volume will include an introduction and two final, synoptic essays, as well as contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on religion and art including Boris Groys, James Elkins, Thierry de Duve, David Morgan, Norman Girardot, Sally Promey, Brent Plate, and Christopher Pinney.

This exciting collection of essays explores the fantastic in world literature, art, theater, film, and popular culture. Highlights include artwork by Edward Carlos and the essay Staging the Phantasmagorical: The Theatrical Challenges and Rewards of William Butler Yeats by internationally acclaimed Yeats scholar James W. Flannery. Readers will be delighted by the wit of British author Brian Aldiss in his essay If Hamlet's Uncle Had Been a Nicer Guy. From new insights into the connections between Dracula and Frankenstein to a discussion of the Internet, the lively volume offers a diverse look at fantasy and science fiction.

'Julia Cameron invented the way people renovate the creative soul' - New York Times The Artist's Way has uncovered the potential of millions of people. International bestselling author Julia Cameron uses her experience and world-renowned techniques as a creativity coach to challenge her readers to go deeper within themselves and open up wider horizons. Featuring inspiring essays on the creative process and more than 100 imaginative, engaging and energising tasks for authentic growth, renewal and healing, The Vein of Gold takes readers on a 'journey to the heart of creativity' through seven kingdoms. Whether you are already actively pursuing a creative enterprise or are just beginning to nurture your own creativity, this powerful book provides the innovative and practical tools for mining the vein of gold within you.

This book offers a multidisciplinary and multi-domain approach to the most recent research results in the field of creative thinking and creativity, authored by renowned international experts. By presenting contributions from different scientific and artistic domains, the book offers a comprehensive description of the state of the art on creativity research. Specifically, the chapters are organized into four parts: 1) Theoretical Aspects of Creativity; 2) Social Aspects of Creativity; 3) Creativity in Design and Engineering; 4) Creativity in Art and Science. In this way, the book becomes a necessary platform for generative dialogue between disciplines that are typically divided by separating walls.

This volume focuses on four cultural phenomena in the Roman world of the late Republic - the garden, a garden painting, tapestry, and the domestic caged bird. They accept or reject a categorisation as art in varying degrees, but they show considerable overlaps in the ways in which they impinge on social space. The study looks, therefore, at the borderlines between things that variously might or might not seem to be art forms. It looks at boundaries in another sense too. Boundaries between different social modes and contexts are embodied and represented in the garden and paintings of gardens, reinforced by the domestic use of decorative textile work, and replicated in the bird cage. The boundaries thus thematised map on to broader boundaries in the Roman house, city, and wider world, becoming part of the framework of the citizen's cognitive development and individual and civic identities. Frederick Jones presents a novel analysis that uses the perspective of cognitive development in relation to how elements of domestic and urban visual culture and the broader world map on to each other. His study for the first time understands the domestic caged bird as a cultural object and uniquely brings together four disparate cases under the umbrella of 'art'.

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion in ideas and theories on art. Art itself has never been more popular, but much recent thinking remains inaccessible and difficult to use. This book assesses the work of leading thinkers (including artists) who are having a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art. Each entry, written by a leading international expert, presents a concise, critical appraisal of a thinker and their contribution to thought about art and its place in the wider cultural context. A guide to the key thinkers who shape today's world of art, this book is a vital reference for anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, its history, theory, philosophy and practice. Theodor ADORNO * Roland BARTHES * Georges BATAILLE * Jean BAUDRILLARD * Walter BENJAMIN * Jay BERNSTEIN * Pierre BOURDIEU * Nicholas BOURRIAUD * Benjamin BUCHLOH * Daniel BUREN * Judith BUTLER * Noel CARROLL * Stanley CAVELL * TJ CLARK * Arthur C. DANTO * Gilles DELEUZE * Jacques DERRIDA * George DICKIE * Thierry DE DUVE * James ELKINS * Hal FOSTER * Michel FOUCAULT * Michael FRIED * Dan GRAHAM * Clement GREENBERG * Fredric JAMESON * Mike KELLEY * Mary KELLY * Joseph KOSUTH * Rosalind KRAUSS * Julia KRISTEVA * Barbara KRUGER * Niklaus LUHMANN * Jean-Francois LYOTARD * Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY * WTJ MITCHELL * Robert MORRIS * Linda NOCHLIN * Adrian PIPER * Griselda POLLOCK * Robert SMITHSON * Jeff WALL * Melanie KLEIN * Albrecht WELLMER * Richard WOLLHEIM

"Interesting...useful for photographers as a reference book." -Amateur Photographer Has pink always been feminine and blue a man's colour? Why are we green with envy? Which colour is most expensive and who is the Goddess of Turquoise? Looking for answers, author Joanna Zoelzer has come across remarkable and entertaining facts about colours. In this beautiful coffee table book, we traverse the colour spectrum with 150 remarkable stories of our experience, understanding and theories of colour. With insights from art, nature, psychology and science, this is an amusing, entertaining, and vibrant journey through the cultural history of colour.

In this invaluable and thought-provoking book, Vladimir Belogolovsky reflects on nearly 20 years of conversations with leading creatives from around the world whose focus is on art, photography, architecture, design, critical theory, and more. His intimate dialogues are with prolific visionaries, the likes of Paul Andreu, Aaron Betsky, Tatiana Bilbao, Christo, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, Glenn Murcutt, Renzo Piano, Moshe Safdie, Ric Scofido, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Michael Sorkin, Stanley Tigerman, Bernard Tschumi, Lin Utzon, Massimo Vignelli, Madelon Vriesendorp, and so many others. He exposes the complexity of their thought processes, while comparing and contrasting them to one another to distill more than 101 ideas. His engaging narrative captures the stories behind every project and every personality while exploring many important questions, including what makes a building architecture? How would a Futurist solve problems vs those whose focus is on nostalgia? The selection of interviews gathers many answers and intentions, but inevitably, also many more questions. Imagine Buildings Floating Like Clouds represents a diverse group of multitalented, creative people who work in disparate places culturally and climatically and came of age in very different times-from the revolutionary 1960s to our own time, when the future, for many, is being more feared than desired.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential and revolutionary philosophers of the twentieth century. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is his long-awaited work on Bacon, widely regarded as one of the most radical painters of the twentieth century.The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyzes the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violation deformations of the flesh, the complex use of color, the method of chance, and the use of the triptych form. Along the way, Deleuze introduces a number of his own famous concepts, such as the 'body without organs' and the 'diagram, ' and contrasts his own approach to painting with that of both the phenomenological and the art historical traditions.Deleuze links Bacon's work to CTzanne's notion of a 'logic' of sensation, which reaches its summit in color and the 'coloring sensation.' Investigating this logic, Deleuze explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Velasquez, CTzanne, and Soutine, as well as Bacon's rejection of expressionism and abstract painting.Long awaited in translation, Francis Bacon is destined to become a classic philosophical reflection on the nature of painting.

By juxtaposing issues and problems, Donald Preziosi's latest collection of essays, In the Aftermath of Art, opens up multiple interpretive possibilities by bringing to the surface hidden resonances in the implications of each text.
In re-reading his own writings, Preziosi opens up alternatives to contemporary discourses on art history and visual culture. A critical commentary by critic, historian, and theorist Johanne Lamoureux complements the author's own introduction, mirroring the multiple interpretations within the essays themselves.

This book explores how speculative thinking is shaping how we relate to our entangled social, mental, and environmental ecologies. It examines how speculative philosophies and concepts are changing geographical research methods and techniques, whilst also developing how speculative thinking transforms the way human, non-human, and more-than-human things are conceptualised in research practices across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Offering the first dedicated compendium of geographical engagements with speculation and speculative thinking, the chapters in this edited collection advance debates about how affective, imperceptible, and infra-sensible qualities of environments might be written about through alternative registers and ontologies of experience. Organised around the themes of Ethics, Technologies, and Aesthetics, the book will appeal to those engaging with architecture, Black political theory, fiction, cinema, children's geographies, biotechnologies, philosophy, rural studies, arts practice, and nuclear waste studies as speculative research practices appropriate for addressing contemporary ecological problems. Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Why does art matter to us, and what makes good art? Why is the role of imagination so important in art? Illustrated with carefully chosen color and black-and-white plates of examples from Michelangelo to Matisse and Poussin to Jackson Pollock, "Revealing Art" explores some of the most important questions we can ask about art. Matthew Kieran clearly but forcefully asks how art inspires us and disgusts us and whether artistic judgment is simply a matter of taste, and if art can be immoral or obscene, should it be censored? He brings such abstract issues to life with fascinating discussions of individual paintings, photographs and sculptures, such as Michelangelo's "Pieta," Andres Serrano's" Piss Christ" and Jackson Pollock's "Summertime."
He also suggests some answers to problems that any one in an art gallery or museum is likely to ask themselves: what is a beautiful work of art, and can art really reveal something true about our own nature?
"Revealing Art" is ideal for anyone interested in debates about art today, or who has simply stood in front of a painting and felt baffled.

The book is a selection of Malcolm Budd's papers on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster of the most important issues in aesthetics which are not specific to particular art forms. These include the nature and proper scope of the aesthetic, the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements, the correct understanding of aesthetic judgements expressed through metaphors, aesthetic realism versus anti-realism, the character of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, the aim of art and the artistic expression of emotion. Other essays are focussed on central issues in the aesthetics of particular art forms: two engage with the most fundamental issue in the aesthetics of music, the question of the correct conception of the phenomenology of the experience of listening to music with understanding; and two consider the nature of pictorial representation, one examining certain well-known views, the other articulating an alternative conception of seeing a picture as a depiction of a certain state of affairs. The final essay in the volume is a comprehensive reconstruction and critical examination of Wittgenstein's aesthetics, both early and late.

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities. Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.

This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them. The book's contributions are drawn from disciplines including the history of photography, visual anthropology and art history, with case studies from a range of countries such as the Netherlands, North America, Australia, Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images.

This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them. The international contributors are drawn from disciplines including the history of photogarphy, visual anthropology and art history, and their pieces focus on areas ranging from the Netherlands, North America and Australia to Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images. Inspiring and instructive, the book can be used either as an overview of this exciting new area of investigation, or as a practical guide to the student or academic on how to understand photographs as objects in diverse contexts.

Focusing on the later work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Claire Raymond takes up the question of the disintegrative condition of the art she produced in the last year of her life. Departing from the techniques of her earlier compositions, Woodman worked in the diazotype process for many of these late pieces, most importantly the monumental Blueprint for a Temple. Raymond shows that through her use of diazotype, a medium that breaks down when exposed to light, Woodman created art that is both supremely evocative aesthetically and inherently unstable physically. Woodman, Raymond contends, was imaginatively responding to the end of the durable image, a historical reality acknowledged in the way her work plays the ephemeral and evanescent against the monumental and enduring. Raymond focuses on the theoretical and the curatorial issues surrounding Woodman's diazotypes, a thematic and practical distress that haunts much of her later art, especially the artist's book and photo series Some Disordered Interior Geometries and Portrait of a Reputation. Rather than conceiving of Woodman herself as fragile, an artist chronicling and seeming to yearn for her own disappearance, Raymond juxtaposes Woodman's career-spanning documentation of her own image against other post-war witnesses of trauma - an artist standing in the museum ruins where she emerges most distinctly as a figure of postmodernity.

'I love it. A practical, spiritual, nurturing book.' - Russell Brand

Since its first publication, The Artist's Way has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert, Tim Ferriss, Reese Witherspoon and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron guides readers in uncovering problems and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to open up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery.

A revolutionary programme for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.

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.

Herbert Read was a maverick character in the cultural life of the twentieth century. A radical leader of the avant garde in the 1930s, and an anarchist revolutionary during the war years, by the time of his death in 1968 he had become a key figure at the heart of the British cultural establishment. To Hell with Culture offers readers an ideal overview of the ideas that marked out this seminal and hugely influential thinker. It is a controversial work that engages the reader in a wide range of topics, from revolutionary art to pornography.
Adept at challenging assumptions and penetrating to the heart of any issue, Read's deft prose encourages the reader to think critically, to question and to subvert the voice of authority, of whatever political or cultural creed. Only through such a critical evaluation of culture, Read believes, can one appreciate the art that arises from the 'unpolitical manifestation of the human spirit'. At a time when authority and value are questionable terms, and when culture itself is a contested concept, Read's is both a challenging and an enlightening voice.

Linda Nochlin's seminal essay on women artists is widely acknowledged as the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. Nochlin refused to handle the question of why there had been no 'great women artists' on its own, corrupted, terms. Instead, she dismantled the very concept of 'greatness', unravelling the basic assumptions that had centred a male-coded 'genius' in the study of art. With unparalleled insight and startling wit, Nochlin laid bare the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art historical thought as not merely a moral failure, but an intellectual one. Freedom, as she sees it, requires women to risk entirely demolishing the art world's institutions, and rebuilding them anew - in other words, to leap into the unknown. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin's essay is published alongside its reappraisal, 'Thirty Years After'. Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race and postcolonial studies, 'Thirty Years After' is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society; Dior even adopted it in their 2018 collections. In the 2020s, at a time when 'certain patriarchal values are making a comeback', Nochlin's message could not be more urgent: as she herself put it in 2015, 'there is still a long way to go'. With 14 illustrations