The Art & Times of Daniel Jocz presents the entrancing and challenging work of American jewellery artist and sculptor Daniel Jocz. There is a spontaneous quality to the work, yet it is always rich with meaning. His open spirit is fully embodied in the 2007 neckpiece series An American's Riff on the Millstone Ruff. Inspired by the extravagant scale of 17th-century Dutch ruffs at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, he decided to update them with automobile paint. Jeannine Falino takes an in-depth look at the twists and turns of Jocz's long career, from his early geometric sculptures to the fashion-forward flocked Candy Wear collection, and from his ruminations on Marlene Dietrich in the form of necklaces featuring enamel smoked cigarettes to the wall reliefs he explores today. Wendy Steiner considers Jocz's place in the avant-garde through the lens of fashion and culture, while Patricia Harris and David Lyon explore his involvement in the rollicking Boston jewellery scene of the late 20th century.

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts  kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I  saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and  then, on the working of some powerful engine, show  signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital  motion." A summer evening's ghost stories,  lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a  runaway imagination--fired by philosophical  discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about  science, galvanism, and the origins of  life--conspired to produce for Marry Shelley this haunting  night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of  her Romantic  masterpiece, Frankenstein. Written in 1816 when she was only  nineteen, Mary Shelley's novel of "The Modern  Prometheus" chillingly dramatized the dangerous  potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A  frightening creation myth for our own time,  Frankenstein remains one of the greatest  horror stories ever written and is an undisputed  classic of its kind.


From the Paperback edition.

The notion of semiotics as a universal language that can encompass any object of perception makes it the focus of a revolutionary field of inquiry, the semiotics of art. This volume represents a unique gathering of semiotic approaches to art: from Saussurian linguistics to transformational grammar, from Prague School aesthetics to Peircean pragmatism, from structuralism to poststructuralism. Though concerned specifically with the semiotics of music and literature, the essays reveal the breadth of semiotics' interdisciplinary appeal, involving specialists in musicology, ethnomusicology, jazz performance, literary criticism, poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric , linguistics, dance, and film. The diversity of authorial training and approach makes this collection a dramatic demonstration of the on-going debates in the field. In many ways the semiotics of art is the testing ground of sign theory as a whole, and work in this subject is as vital to the interests of theoretical semioticians as to students of the arts. It is to both these interests that this volume is addressed.

Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria's Secret and "America's Next Top Model" to the snapshots we post on Facebook and Twitter, our culture is fixated on the pose, the state of existing simultaneously as artifice and the real thing.

In this bold view of contemporary culture, Wendy Steiner shows us the very meaning of the arts in the process of transformation. Her story begins at the turn of the last century, as the arts abandoned the representation of the world for a heady embrace of the abstract, the surreal, and the self-referential. Today though, this "separate sphere of the aesthetic" is indistinguishable from normal life. Media and images overwhelm us: we gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists, craving contact with what J. M. Coetzee has called "the real real thing." As the World Wide Web renders the lower-case world in ever-higher definition, the reality-based genres of memoir and documentary are displacing fiction, and novels and films are depicting the contemporary condition through model-protagonists who are half-human, half-image. Steiner shows the arts searching out a new ethical potential through this figure: by stressing the independent existence of the model, they welcome in the audience in all its unpredictability, redefining aesthetic experience as a real-world interaction with the promise of empathy, reciprocity, and egalitarian connection.

A masterly performance by a penetrating, inquisitive mind, "The Real Real Thing" is that rarest of books, one whose provocations and inspirations will inspire readers to take a new--and nuanced--look at the world around them.

In "Venus in Exile" renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art--the female subject and ornament--became modernist taboos. To this day it is hard to champion beauty in art without sounding aesthetically or politically retrograde. Steiner argues instead that the experience of beauty is a form of communication, a subject-object interchange in which finding someone or something beautiful is at the same time recognizing beauty in oneself. This idea has led artists and writers such as Marlene Dumas, Christopher Bram, and Cindy Sherman to focus on the long-ignored figure of the model, who function in art as both a subject and an object. Steiner concludes "Venus in Exile" on a decidedly optimistic note, demonstrating that beauty has created a new and intensely pleasurable direction for contemporary artistic practice.