When he stands before Giorgione's La Tempesta, John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost Eden. A photograph of a gravely joyful crowd gathered o
With the art in 43 award-winning books as your palette, and the author's constructive insight and guidance for support, you can introduce the elements of design and explore the various media used by i
At the height of the controversy over government funding for "obscene" works of art, internationally renowned conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth created "The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the
Most instructors who teach introductory courses in aesthetics or the philosophy of arts use the visual arts as their implicit reference for "art" in general, yet until now there has been no aesthetics
It has long been considered a mark of naivete to ask of a work of art: What does it say? But as Timothy W. Luke demonstrates in Shows of Force, artwork is capable of saying plenty, and much of the mes
As a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilizati
Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity
Looks at the portrayal of women in art, photographs, motion pictures, and literature, and argues that male artists do not inevitably misrepresent women
The most controversial art critic in America--author of the bestselling The Fatal Shore and The Shock of the New--looks with love and loathing, wit and authority, at art and artists from the past to t
Pliny sketches a theory of advancing moral decline and extravagance, in the course of which he gives a detailed account of six centuries of classical art and a fascinating sketch of the world of the r
From the Preface:"The essays in Feminist Art Criticism are theoretical, and we selected them for several reasons. First, they show a diversity of concerns. These include spirituality, sexuali
In the last thirty years, work in analytic philosophy of art has flourished, and it has given rise to considerably controversy. Stephen Davies describes and analyzes the definition of art as it has be
"This learned and heavy volume should be placed on the shelves of every art historical library."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books"This is an engaged and passionate work by a writer with
For many years Rudolf Arnheim, known as the leading psychologist of art, has been keeping notebooks in which to jot down observations, ideas, questions, and even (after a stay in Japan for a year) poe
Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called "art," and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in
"Weinstein explores the attitudes and organizations of artists and architects in Berlin, Munich, and Dresden in response to the tumultuous events associated with the end of WWI and the (failed) Revolu
At a time when a pile of bricks is displayed in a museum, when music is composed for performance underwater, and the boundaries between popular and fine art are fluid, conventional understandings of art are strained in describing what art is, what it includes or excludes, whether and how it should be evaluated, and what importance should be assigned the arts in society. In this book, Vera Zolberg examines diverse theoretical approaches to the study of the arts. Ranging over humanistic and social scientific views representing a variety of scholarly traditions, American and European, she then develops a sociological approach that evaluates the institutional, economic, and political influences on the creation of art, while also affirming the importance of the question of artistic quality. The author examines the arts in the social contexts in which people become artists, the institutions in which their careers develop, the supports and pressures they face, the publics they need to please,
This is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visu
