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The power of art : a human history of art: from Babylon to New York City
Unlocking the human stories behind millennia of art, the eminent curator, taking us from ancient Babylon to contemporary Pyongyang, explains art's power to illuminate our lives and reveals how great art resonates powerfully by transcending the boundaries of time.
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The Vienna School of Art History
Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence of art history as a discipline, the establishment of norms of scholarly enquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. While Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary, the so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study. Located in the Habsburg imperial capital, Vienna art historians frequently became entangled in debates that were of importance to art historians elsewhere in the Empire, and the book pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. The Vienna School was well known for its methodological innovations and this book analyzes its contributions in this area. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history, in particular the way in which art historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.
eBook
What art does : an unfinished theory
Why do we need art? 'What Art Does' is an invitation to explore this vital question. It is a chance to understand how art is made by all of us. How it creates communities, opens our worlds, and can transform us. Curious and playful, richly illustrated, full of ideas and life, it is an inspiring call to imagine a different future.
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Talking Prices
How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent? Talking Prices is the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce. Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud. Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.
eBook
Art unpacked : 50 works of art: uncovered, explored, explained, with over 850 images
\"A down-to-earth, visual guidebook that shows how to \"read,\" understand, and get the most out of art. For beginners, art history might seem a daunting subject with complex rules and impenetrable technical language. Even for more seasoned art lovers the question of how to think about art is a perennial riddle. Art Uncovered is the perfect resource for both audiences: an engaging, visual primer for the general reader and educators. Designed like an instruction manual, fifty key artworks from around the world are deconstructed with explanations, diagrams, and close-ups in order to reveal the elements that comprise a masterpiece. Dating from the earliest times to the present, the artworks under analysis are drawn from many cultures and cover all forms of visual media, including drawing, illustration, photography, prints, and sculpture. Matthew Wilson's simple approach, using established art historical methods, enables the reader to discover the fundamentals of art history, from considerations of function, historical context, iconography, and artists' experience to broader issues of identity, including feminism, gender, and postcolonialism. Whether it's the mask of Tutankhamun or Dorothea Lange's photograph Migrant Mother, Katsushika Hokusai's GreatWave or Kara Walker's Gone, each image is dissected on the page in a no-nonsense style, with explanatory notes detailing artists' sources of inspiration, associated styles and movements, plus any relevant quotes, related visuals, and other contextual and issue-led information with keywords for handy cross-referencing. The resulting book is a dynamic visual resource that will inspire and spark enjoyment of art in all its forms\"--Publisher's description.
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We Make Each Other Beautiful
We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action \"artivism\" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change. Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists —Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown—and the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.
eBook
Art, annotated : your expert guide to 500 of the world's greatest works of art
Combining reproductions of each work of art with precise annotations and visual analysis, it is an expertly curated selection of the finest paintings, sculptures, and prints in history. Immerse yourself in this book spanning 3,000 years of art.
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The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde
This book addresses late-Soviet and post-Soviet art in Armenia in the context of turbulent transformations from the late 1980s to 2004. It explores the emergence of 'contemporary art' in Armenia from within and in opposition to the practices, aesthetics and institutions of Socialist Realism and National Modernism. This historical study outlines the politics (liberal democracy), aesthetics (autonomous art secured by the gesture of the individual artist), and ethics (ideals of absolute freedom and radical individualism) of contemporary art in Armenia and points towards its limitations. Through the historical investigation, a theory of post-Soviet art historiography is developed, one that is based on a dialectic of rupture and continuity in relation to the Soviet past. As the first English-language study on contemporary art in Armenia, the book is of prime interest for artists, scholars, curators and critics interested in post-Soviet art and culture and in global art historiography.
eBook
Children's book of art
Including all of the important art movements from Renaissance to Rococo as well as the great artists from these eras, this book presents a whirlwind tour of the world's greatest art forms.
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Almost nothing
What does an assemblage made out of crumpled newspaper have in common with an empty room in which the lights go on and off every five seconds? This book argues that they are both examples of a 'precarious' art that flourished from the late 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, in light of a growing awareness of the individual's fragile existence in capitalist society. Focusing on comparative case studies drawn from European, North and South American practices, this study maps out a network of similar concerns and practices, while outlining its evolution from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book will provide students and amateurs of contemporary art and culture with new insights into contemporary art practices and the critical issues that they raise concerning the material status of the art object, the role of the artist in society, and the relation between art and everyday life.
eBook