Pamela M. Lee s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, yvind Fahlstr m and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.

With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

Pamela M. Lee s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, yvind Fahlstr m and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.

With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

A fresh and engaging look at the controversial work of Jeff Koons, with insightful analyses and illustrations of all of his iconic pieces alongside preparatory works and historical photographs Examining the breadth and depth of thirty-five years of work by Jeff Koons (b. 1955), one of the most influential and controversial artists of the 20th century, this highly anticipated volume features all of his most famous pieces. In an engaging overview essay, Scott Rothkopf carefully examines the evolution of Koons' work and his development over the past thirty-five years, offering a fresh scholarly perspective on the artist's multi-faceted career. In addition, short essays by a wide range of interdisciplinary contributors-from academics to novelists-probe provocative topics such as celebrity and media, markets and money, and technology and fabrication. Also included are preparatory sketches and plans for sculptures and paintings as well as installation photographs that shed light on Koons' artistic process and trace the development of his work throughout his landmark career. Koons has risen to international fame making art that reimagines and recontextualizes images and objects from popular culture such as vacuum cleaners, basketballs, and balloon animals. Created with painstaking attention to detail by a team of fabricators, these objects raise questions about taste and popular culture, and position Koons as one of the most lauded and criticized artists working today. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art (06/27/14-10/19/14) Centre Pompidou (11/26/14-04/27/15) Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (06/05/15-09/27/15)

How the approaches and methods of think tanks-including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics-paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism. In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks-including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics-paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians. Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an "Opsroom" for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.

An examination of the pervasive anxiety about and fixation with time seen in 1960s art. In the 1960s art fell out of time; both artists and critics lost their temporal bearings in response to what E. M. Cioran called "not being entitled to time." This anxiety and uneasiness about time, which Pamela Lee calls "chronophobia," cut across movements, media, and genres, and was figured in works ranging from kinetic sculptures to Andy Warhol films. Despite its pervasiveness, the subject of time and 1960s art has gone largely unexamined in historical accounts of the period. Chronophobia is the first critical attempt to define this obsession and analyze it in relation to art and technology. Lee discusses the chronophobia of art relative to the emergence of the Information Age in postwar culture. The accompanying rapid technological transformations, including the advent of computers and automation processes, produced for many an acute sense of historical unknowing; the seemingly accelerated pace of life began to outstrip any attempts to make sense of the present. Lee sees the attitude of 1960s art to time as a historical prelude to our current fixation on time and speed within digital culture. Reflecting upon the 1960s cultural anxiety about temporality, she argues, helps us historicize our current relation to technology and time. After an introductory framing of terms, Lee discusses such topics as "presentness" with repect to the interest in systems theory in 1960s art; kinetic sculpture and new forms of global media; the temporality of the body and the spatialization of the visual image in the paintings of Bridget Riley and the performance art of Carolee Schneemann; Robert Smithson's interest in seriality and futurity, considered in light of his reading of George Kubler's important work The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things and Norbert Wiener's discussion of cybernetics; and the endless belaboring of the present in sixties art, as seen in Warhol's Empire and the work of On Kawara.