A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
25 Women will not disappoint. The book collects Hickey’s best and most important writing about female artists from the past twenty years. But this is far more than a compilation: Hickey has revised each essay, bringing them up to date and drawing out common themes. Written in Hickey’s trademark style—accessible, witty, and powerfully illuminating—25 Women analyzes the work of Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Fiona Rae, Lynda Benglis, Karen Carson, and many others. Hickey discusses their work as work, bringing politics and gender into the discussion only where it seems warranted by the art itself. The resulting book is not only a deep engagement with some of the most influential and innovative contemporary artists, but also a reflection on the life and role of the critic: the decisions, judgments, politics, and ethics that critics negotiate throughout their careers in the art world.
Always engaging, often controversial, and never dull, Dave Hickey is a writer who gets people excited—and talking—about art. 25 Women will thrill his many fans, and make him plenty of new ones.
series. In the first section, Theodore Wolff deals with the role of the
art critic in education. He gives a practical overview of how the principles
and practices of art criticism can be applied to the teaching of art (k-12).
In the second, George Geahigan begins with an historical overview of art
criticism in education literature and provides a conceptualized approach
to critical inquiry, asserting that the most effective form of that inquiry
is the pursuit of meaning in works of art. A rare combination of the practical
and theoretical, Art Criticism and Education will be an invaluable
aid to anyone involved in art education.
A volume in the series Disciplines in Art Education: Contexts of Understanding,
edited by Ralph Smith
Supported by the Getty Foundation
So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, The End of the History of Art?. "Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art," according to the Economist, Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues—the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum—and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art.
With Art History after Modernism, Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.
In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xōchitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda’s grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she’s going to film a groundbreaking autocritical documentary in Mexico.
But then everything starts to fall apart when Xōchitl’s biological clock begins beeping, Amanda’s father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodes just as she has a breakthrough.
In The Artemisia Files, Mieke Bal and her coauthors look squarely at this early icon of feminist art history and the question of her status as an artist. Considering the events that shaped her life and reputation—her relationship to her father and her role as the victim in a highly publicized rape case during which she was tortured into giving evidence—the authors make the case that Artemisia's importance is due to more than her role as a poster child in the feminist attack on traditional art history; here, Artemisia emerges more fully as a highly original artist whose work is greater than the sum of the events that have traditionally defined her.
The fresh, engaging discourse in The Artemisia Files will help to both renew the reputation of this artist on the merit of her work and establish her rightful place in the history of art.
Although he discusses well-known figures like Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, Michaels’s focus is on a group of younger artists, including Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Liz Deschenes, and Arthur Ou. All born after 1965, they have always lived in a world where, on the one hand, artistic ambition has been synonymous with the critique of autonomous form and intentional meaning, while, on the other, the struggle between capital and labor has essentially been won by capital. Contending that the aesthetic and political conditions are connected, Michaels argues that these artists’ new commitment to form and meaning is a way for them to depict the conditions that have taken US economic inequality from its lowest level, in 1968, to its highest level today. As Michaels demonstrates, these works of art, unimaginable without the postmodern critique of autonomy and intentionality, end up departing and dissenting from that critique in continually interesting and innovative ways.
Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism—of Pollock, Miró, and Matisse—has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic of all time. This volume, a lively reassessment of Greenberg’s writings, features three approaches to the man and his work: Greenberg as critic, doctrinaire, and theorist. The book also features a transcription of a public debate with Greenberg that de Duve organized at the University of Ottawa in 1988. Clement Greenberg Between the Lines will be an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts of modern art.
“In this compelling study, Thierry de Duve reads Greenberg against the grain of the famous critic’s critics—and sometimes against the grain of the critic himself. By reinterpreting Greenberg’s interpretations of Pollock, Duchamp, and other canonical figures, de Duve establishes new theoretical coordinates by which to understand the uneasy complexities and importance of Greenberg’s practice.” John O’Brian, editor of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms
“De Duve is an expert on theoretical aesthetics and thus well suited to reassess the formalist tenets of the late American art critic's theory on art and culture. . . . De Duve's close readings of Greenberg . . . contain much of interest, and the author clearly enjoys matching wits with ‘the world's best known art critic.’” Library Journal
Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan’s entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan’s own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan’s influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan’s ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art’s recent transgressions and what its future may hold.
Distinctionand Denial challenges conventional theories of race and art by examining the role early twentieth-century art critics played in marginalizing African American artists. Mary Ann Calo dispels the myth of a unified African American artistic tradition through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America’s cultural center. By documenting the effects of the “Negro aesthetic” on African American artists working in the interwar years, Distinctionand Denial shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture—never fully inside or outside the mainstream.
“A major contribution to the scholarship of African American artists in the inter-war period. With scrupulous research and probing analyses, Calo’s study enables scholars, students, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance to grasp the intellectual debates, institutional support, and art world promotion that advanced an emerging cohort of African American artists.”
—Patricia Hills, Boston University
“A careful, thorough, historically grounded study that builds a new and significant argument challenging conventional histories of African American art. Sure to become indispensable to any scholarly discussion of American art or African American cultural studies.”
—Helen Langa, American University
Mary Ann Calo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University. She is author of Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century and editor of Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings.
Caroline Jones's magisterial study widens Greenberg's fundamental tenet of "opticality"-the idea that modernist art is apprehended through "eyesight alone"-to a broader arena, examining how the critic's emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world. Greenberg's modernist discourse, Jones argues, developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg's attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation-or bureaucratization-of the body's senses. Working through these historical developments, Jones brings Greenberg's theories into contemporary philosophical debates about agency and subjectivity.
Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, philosophers, and all those interested in the arts a critical history of this generative figure, bringing his work fully into dialogue with the ideas that shape contemporary critical discourse and shedding light not only on Clement Greenberg but also on the contested history of modernism itself.
"A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."—David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education
"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."—Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.
Belting explores and explains how twentieth-century artists, following Duchamp, struggled with their personal dreams of absolute art. It was not until the 1960s that artists, such as Warhol, finally began to reject the idea of the individual, totemic work of art and its permanent exhibition, as well as the related concept of the "masterpiece" and the outmoded art market that fed off it.
Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2018
Many Latin American artists and critics in the 1920s drew on the values of modernism to question the cultural authority of Europe. Modernism gave them a tool for coping with the mobility of their circumstances, as well as the inspiration for works that questioned the very concepts of the artist and the artwork and opened the realm of art to untrained and self-taught artists, artisans, and women. Writing about the modernist works in newspapers and magazines, critics provided a new vocabulary with which to interpret and assign value to the expanding sets of abstracted forms produced by these artists, whose lives were shaped by mobility.
The Mobility of Modernism examines modernist artworks and criticism that circulated among a network of cities, including Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Havana, and Lima. Harper Montgomery maps the dialogues and relationships among critics who published in avant-gardist magazines such as Amauta and Revista de Avance and artists such as Carlos Mérida, Xul Solar, and Emilio Pettoruti, among others, who championed esoteric forms of abstraction. She makes a convincing case that, for these artists and critics, modernism became an anticolonial stance which raised issues that are still vital today—the tensions between the local and the global, the ability of artists to speak for blighted or unincorporated people, and, above all, how advanced art and its champions can enact a politics of opposition.
Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to modern art, he combined scholarly erudition with eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis that were always put into the service of interpretation.
Following the series publication on Pablo Picasso, this volume focuses on other modern artists, including Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Max Ernst, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Hans Haacke, and Jeff Koons. Included are seven unpublished lectures and essays, Steinberg’s landmark essay “Encounters with Rauschenberg,” a survey of twentieth-century sculpture, and an examination of the role of authorial predilections in critical writing. The final chapter presents a collection of Steinberg’s humorous pieces, witty forays penned for his own amusement.
Modern Art is the fifth and final volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.
As the first anthology in English of the critical and theoretical writings of this influential artist, Myself and My Aims makes the case for Schwitters as one of the most creative thinkers of his generation. Including material that has never before been published, this volume presents the full range of his prolific writing on the art and attitudes of his time, joining existing translations of his children’s stories, poetry, and fiction to give new readers unprecedented access to his literary imagination. With an accessible introduction by Megan R. Luke and elegant English translations by Timothy Grundy, this book will prove an exceptional resource for artists, scholars, and enthusiasts of his art.
Contributors. Cristina Albu, Amanda Boetzkes, Brianne Cohen, Kris Cohen, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Christine Filippone, Johanna Gosse, Francis Halsall, Judith Rodenbeck, Dawna Schuld, Luke Skrebowski, Timothy Stott, John Tyson
This book opens in eleventh-century China, where scholars were the first in world history to systematically illustrate and document ancient artifacts. As Jeffrey Moser argues, the visual, technical, and conceptual mechanisms they developed to record these objects laid the foundations for methods of visualizing knowledge that scholars throughout early modern East Asia would use to make sense of the world around them.
Of the artifacts these scholars studied, the most celebrated were bronze ritual vessels that had been cast nearly two thousand years earlier. While working to make sense of the relationship between the bronzes’ complex shapes and their inscribed glyphs, they came to realize that the objects were “nominal things”—objects inscribed with names that identified their own categories and uses. Eleventh-century scholars knew the meaning of these glyphs from hallowed Confucian writings that had been passed down through centuries, but they found shocking disconnects between the names and the bronzes on which they were inscribed. Nominal Things traces the process by which a distinctive system of empiricism was nurtured by discrepancies between the complex materiality of the bronzes and their inscriptions. By revealing the connections between the new empiricism and older ways of knowing, the book explains how scholars refashioned the words of the Confucian classics into material reality.
When Dave Hickey was twelve, he rode the surfer’s dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn’t quite turn out—he shot the pier and dashed himself against the rocks of Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, which nearly killed him.
Hickey went on to develop a career as one of America’s foremost critical iconoclasts, a trusted no-nonsense voice commenting on the worlds of art and culture. Perfect Wave brings together essays on a wide range of subjects from throughout Hickey’s career, displaying his breadth of interest and powerful insight into what makes art work, or not, and why we care. With Hickey as our guide, we travel to Disneyland and Vegas, London and Venice. We discover the genius of Karen Carpenter and Waylon Jennings, learn why Robert Mitchum matters more than Jimmy Stewart, and see how the stillness of Antonioni speaks to us today. Never slow to judge—or to surprise us in doing so—Hickey relates his wincing disappointment in the later career of his early hero Susan Sontag and shows us the appeal to our commonality that we’ve been missing in Norman Rockwell.
Bookended by previously unpublished personal essays that offer a new glimpse into Hickey’s own life—including the aforementioned conclusion to his surfing career—Perfect Wave is a welcome addition to the Hickey canon.
“We got to talking”—so David Antin begins the introduction to Radical Coherency, embarking on the pursuit that has marked much of his breathless, brilliantly conversational work. For the past forty years, whether spoken under the guise of performance artist or poet, cultural explorer or literary critic, Antin’s innovative observations have helped us to better understand everything from Pop to Postmodernism.
Intimately wedded to the worlds of conceptual art and poetics, Radical Coherency collects Antin’s influential critical essays and spontaneous, performed lectures (or “talk pieces”) for the very first time, capturing one of the most distinctive perspectives in contemporary literature. The essays presented here range from the first serious assessment of Andy Warhol published in a major art journal, as well as Antin’s provocative take on Clement Greenberg’s theory of Modernism, to frontline interventions in present debates on poetics and fugitive pieces from the ’60s and ’70s that still sparkle today—and represent a gold mine for art historians of the period. From John Cage to Allan Kaprow, Mark Rothko to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Antin takes the reader on an idiosyncratic, personal journey through twentieth-century culture with his trademark antiformalist panache—one thatwill be welcomed by any fan of this consummate trailblazer.
Valuable and timely in its long historical and critical perspective on the legacy of romanticism to Victorian art and thought, The Rescue of Romanticism is the first book-length study of the close intellectual relationship between Walter Pater and John Ruskin, the two most important Victorian critics of art. Kenneth Daley explores the work and thought of both writers in context with other Victorian writers, and enlarges the issues at stake between them, connecting these issues to ongoing artistic, cultural, and political concerns of the modern world.
Professor Daley gives a more finely honed picture than ever before of romanticism’s emergence as a literary concept in Victorian England, detailing the political differences that characterize the opposition between John Ruskin and his younger contemporary, Walter Pater, over the nature of romanticism. Individual chapters reassess the Victorian reception of such romantic figures as Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.
Daley demonstrates how Pater’s “modern” reading of romanticism emerged from Ruskin’s distrust of romanticism and from Ruskin’s arguments and examples defining pathetic fallacy. His discussion of Ruskin’s Oxford lectures and their timing in Pater’s developing career refresh the intersections of the two bodies of work and the portrait of the Victorian period in general.
"This book seems to give me eyes," wrote Charlotte Brontë of Ruskin's Modern Painters. Elizabeth Helsinger here explores theprofound changes Ruskin induced in theway nineteenth-century viewers looked atnature and at art.
Helsinger argues that Ruskin transformedthe artist- or poet-oriented aesthetics ofromanticism into a beholder- or reader-oriented criticism. Combining critical attention to Ruskin's prose with her ownwide-ranging scholarship, Helsinger placesRuskin's perceptual reforms within previously unexplored intellectual and culturalcontexts. She connects his thought withWordsworth's poetry, Turner's landscapeart, and Carlyle's history, and shows theeffect on his ideas of romantic literary andart criticism, associationist psychology, historicism, contemporary travel art andliterature, and Victorian philology.
This illuminating study of Ruskin's criticism should be welcomed by students ofnineteenth-century intellectual, literary,and art history.
Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation—all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism's avant-garde. At the cutting edge of new media research, Drucker surveys a wide range of exciting contemporary artists, demonstrating their clear departure from the past and petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well. Sweet Dreams is a testament to the creative processes and self-conscious heterogeneity of art today as well as a revolutionary effort to solicit collaboration that will encourage the production of imaginative thought and contribute to contemporary life.
Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world.
Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.
Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world.
Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.
In Two Thumbs Up, philosopher Stephanie Ross tackles these questions, revealing the ways that critics influence our decisions, and why that’s a good thing. Starting from David Hume’s conception of ideal critics, Ross refines his position and makes the case that review-based journalistic or consumer reporting criticism proves the best model for helping us find and appreciate quality. She addresses and critiques several other positions and, in the process, she demonstrates how aesthetic and philosophical concerns permeate our lives, choices, and culture. Ultimately, whether we’re searching for the right wine or the best concert, Ross encourages us all to find and follow critics whose taste we share.
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