Results by title
3258 books match the query 'Art' and 69 start with n
Noise Channels
Glitch and Error in Digital CulturePeter Krapp
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency; in doing so, he shows how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.
Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human–computer interface.
Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.
Nola
A Memoir of Faith, Art, and MadnessRobin Hemley
University of Iowa Press, 1998
Nominal Things
Bronzes in the Making of Medieval ChinaJeffrey Moser
University of Chicago Press, 2023
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.
Non-Construction
An Architectural Gesture in Artistic ResearchRonny Hardliz
Diaphanes, 2021
Non-literary Fiction
Art of the Americas under NeoliberalismEsther Gabara
University of Chicago Press, 2022
With Non-literary Fiction, Esther Gabara examines how contemporary art produced across the Americas has reacted to the rising tide of neoliberal regimes, focusing on the crucial role of fiction in daily politics. Gabara argues that these fictions depart from familiar literary narrative structures and emerge in the new mediums and practices that have revolutionized contemporary art. Each chapter details how fiction is created through visual art forms—in performance and body art, posters, mail art, found objects, and installations. For Gabara, these fictions comprise a type of art that asks viewers to collaborate in the creation of the work and helps them to withstand the brutal restrictions imposed by dominant neoliberal regimes.
During repressive regimes of the 1960s and 1970s and free trade agreements of the 1990s, artists and critics consistently said no to economic privatization, political deregulation, and reactionary social logic as they rejected inherited notions of visual, literary, and political representation. Through close analyses of artworks and writings by leading figures of these two generations, including Indigenous thinkers, Gabara shows how negation allows for the creation of fiction outside textual forms of literature.
None Like Us
Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic LifeStephen Best
Duke University Press, 2018
Norman Rockwell
The Underside of InnocenceRichard Halpern
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Norman Rockwell’s scenes of everyday small-town life are among the most indelible images in all of twentieth-century art. While opinions of Rockwell vary from uncritical admiration to sneering contempt, those who love him and those who dismiss him do agree on one thing: his art embodies a distinctively American style of innocence.
In this sure-to-be controversial book, Richard Halpern argues that this sense of innocence arises from our reluctance—and also Rockwell’s—to acknowledge the often disturbing dimensions of his works. Rockwell’s paintings frequently teem with perverse acts of voyeurism and desire but contrive to keep these acts invisible—or rather, hidden in plain sight, available for unacknowledged pleasure but easily denied by the viewer.
Rockwell emerges in this book, then, as a deviously brilliant artist, a remorseless diagnostician of the innocence in which we bathe ourselves, and a continuing, unexpected influence on contemporary artists. Far from a banal painter of the ordinary, Halpern argues, Rockwell is someone we have not yet dared to see for the complex creature he is: a wholesome pervert, a knowing innocent, and a kitschy genius.
Provocative but judicious, witty but deeply informed, Norman Rockwell is a book rich in suggestive propositions and eye-opening details—one that will change forever the way we think about this American icon and his works.
Nostalgia and Videogame Music
A Primer of Case Studies, Theories and Analyses for the Player-AcademicEdited by Vincent E. Rone, Can Aksoy, and Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey
Intellect Books, 2022
This book allows readers to understand the relationships and memories they often form around games, and music is central to this process. The quest into the past begins with this book, a map that leads to the intersection between nostalgia and videogame music. Informed by research on musicology, memory, and practices of gaming culture, this edited volume discusses different forms of nostalgia, considers how videogames display their relation to those forms, and explores the ways theoretically self-conscious positions can be found in games. An important scholarly addition to the burgeoning field of ludomusicology, this book will appeal to researchers, educators, practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students, and videogame fans and players alike.
Not Here, Not Now, Not That!
Protest over Art and Culture in AmericaSteven J. Tepper
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In the late 1990s Angels in America,Tony Kushner’s epic play about homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan era, toured the country, inspiring protests in a handful of cities while others received it warmly. Why do people fight over some works of art but not others? Not Here, Not Now, Not That! examines a wide range of controversies over films, books, paintings, sculptures, clothing, music, and television in dozens of cities across the country to find out what turns personal offense into public protest.
What Steven J. Tepper discovers is that these protests are always deeply rooted in local concerns. Furthermore, they are essential to the process of working out our differences in a civil society. To explore the local nature of public protests in detail, Tepper analyzes cases in seventy-one cities, including an in-depth look at Atlanta in the late 1990s, finding that debates there over memorials, public artworks, books, and parades served as a way for Atlantans to develop a vision of the future at a time of rapid growth and change.
Eschewing simplistic narratives that reduce public protests to political maneuvering, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! at last provides the social context necessary to fully understand this fascinating phenomenon.
Not Straight from Germany
Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship since Magnus HirschfeldMichael Thomas Taylor, Annette F. Timm, and Rainer Herrn, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Two visual sourcebooks and catalog essays on an exhibition of contemporary artists’ responses to the Hirschfeld historical materials interrogate the modes of visual representation that Hirschfeld employed by re-imagining the public visibility of his institute from a contemporary perspective. The archival material includes stunning, never-before-published images from Hirschfeld’s institute that challenge many received ideas, while the scholarly and art catalog essays explore collaboration and dialogue as methods of research and activism that resonate beyond the academy to pressing issues of public concern.
Not Your Mother's Mammy
The Black Domestic Worker in Transatlantic Women’s MediaTracey L Walters
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Not-Forgetting
Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of MasteryRosalyn Deutsche
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Amid times of emboldened cruelty and perpetual war, Rosalyn Deutsche links contemporary art to three practices that counter the prevailing destructiveness: psychoanalytic feminism, radical democracy, and war resistance. Deutsche considers how art joins these radical practices to challenge desires for mastery and dominion, which are encapsulated in the Eurocentric conception of the human that goes under the name “Man” and is driven by deadly inclinations that Deutsche calls masculinist. The masculinist subject—as an individual or a group—universalizes itself, claims to speak on behalf of humanity, and meets differences with conquest.
Analyzing artworks by Christopher D’Arcangelo, Robert Filliou, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, James Welling, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Deutsche illuminates the diverse ways in which they expose, question, and trouble the visual fantasies that express masculinist desire. Undermining the mastering subject, these artworks invite viewers to question the positions they assume in relation to others. Together, the essays in Not-Forgetting, written between 1999 and 2020, argue that this art offers a unique contribution to building a less cruel and violent society.
Notebooks, Volume 1, 1998-99
Anselm Kiefer
Seagull Books, 2015
The first volume of Notebooks spans the years 1998-1999 and traces the origins and creative process of Kiefer’s visual works during this period. In this volume, Kiefer returns constantly to his touchstones: sixteenth-century alchemist Robert Fludd, German romantic poet Novalis, Martin Heidegger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Robert Musil, and many other writers and thinkers. The entries reveal the process by which his artworks are informed by his reading—and vice versa—and track the development of the works he created in the late 1990s. Translated into English for the first time by Tess Lewis, the diaries reveal Kiefer’s strong affinity for language and let readers witness the process of thoughts, experiences, and adventures slowly transcending the limits of art, achieving meaning in and beyond their medium.
Praise for Kiefer
“His works recall, in this sense, the grand tradition of history painting, with its notion about the elevated role of art in society, except that they do not presume moral certainty. What makes Kiefer’s work so convincing . . . is precisely its ambiguity and self-doubt, its rejection of easy solutions, historical amnesia, and transcendence.”—New York Times
“Wordiness for Kiefer is painterliness. The library and the gallery, the book and the frame inseparable, even interchangeable, in his monumental archive of human memory. Not since Picasso’s Guernica have pictures demanded so urgently that we studiously reflect and recollect in their presence.”—Simon Schama
Notebooks, Volume 1, 1998-99
Anselm Kiefer
Seagull Books, 2015
The first volume of Notebooks spans the years 1998-1999 and traces the origins and creative process of Kiefer’s visual works during this period. In this volume, Kiefer returns constantly to his touchstones: sixteenth-century alchemist Robert Fludd, German romantic poet Novalis, Martin Heidegger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Robert Musil, and many other writers and thinkers. The entries reveal the process by which his artworks are informed by his reading—and vice versa—and track the development of the works he created in the late 1990s. Translated into English for the first time by Tess Lewis, the diaries reveal Kiefer’s strong affinity for language and let readers witness the process of thoughts, experiences, and adventures slowly transcending the limits of art, achieving meaning in and beyond their medium.
Praise for Kiefer
“His works recall, in this sense, the grand tradition of history painting, with its notion about the elevated role of art in society, except that they do not presume moral certainty. What makes Kiefer’s work so convincing . . . is precisely its ambiguity and self-doubt, its rejection of easy solutions, historical amnesia, and transcendence.”—New York Times
“Wordiness for Kiefer is painterliness. The library and the gallery, the book and the frame inseparable, even interchangeable, in his monumental archive of human memory. Not since Picasso’s Guernica have pictures demanded so urgently that we studiously reflect and recollect in their presence.”—Simon Schama
Notes and Methods
Hilma af Klint
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Hilma af Klint studied at the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm where she was part of the first generation of female students. Up until the beginning of the century, she painted mainly landscapes and detailed botanical studies. Her work from this period was that of a young artist of her time who meticulously observed the world around her. But, like many of her contemporaries, af Klint was also interested in the invisible relationships that shape our world, believing strongly in a spiritual dimension. She joined the Theosophical Society, and, with four fellow female members who together called themselves “The Five,” began to study mediumship. Between 1906 and 1915, purportedly guided by a higher power, af Klint created 193 individual works that, in both scale and scope of imagery, are like no other art created at that time. Botanically inspired images and mystical symbols, diagrams, words, and geometric series, all form part of af Klint’s abstract language. These abstract techniques would not be seen again until years later.
Notes and Methods presents facsimile reproductions of a wide array of af Klint’s early notebooks accompanied by the first English translation of af Klint’s extensive writings. It contains the rarely seen “Blue Notebooks,” hand-painted and annotated catalogues af Klint created of her most famous series “Paintings for the Temple,” and a dictionary compiled by af Klint of the words and letters found in her work. This extraordinary collection is edited by and copublished with Christine Burgin, and features an introduction by Iris Müller-Westermann. It will stand as an important and timely contribution to the legacy of Hilma af Klint.
Nowville
The Untold History of Nashville's Contemporary Art SceneJoe Nolan
Vanderbilt University Press, 2024
This is the origin story of Nashville’s surging contemporary art scene told by the ones who were there before anyone else. Not a story about commercial spaces or official institutions—this is the story of moldy warehouse studios and improvised galleries, happy-kegger after-parties and front lawn art sales, exhibitions in apartment living rooms and secret art displays hidden in plain sight.
Nowville is an oral history of the Nashville art scene beginning in the 1990s. Author Joe Nolan tracks down the city’s art punks, art monks, radical art students, and visionary pioneers to share what made their moments in Nashville so special. He also offers insights into how this homespun movement powered by DIY innovating came to be a thriving creative community and a cornerstone of the city’s contemporary allure.
This book is the recipient of the 2025 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.
Nuremberg, a Renaissance City, 1500-1618
By Jeffrey Chipps Smith
University of Texas Press, 1983
Although renowned for the excellence of its medieval art, the German city of Nuremberg reached the height of its artistic brilliance during the Renaissance. Beginning its ascendancy during the late fifteenth century, by 1500 the city had blossomed into both Germany's preeminent artistic center and one of the foremost cultural centers in all of Europe. Nuremberg was the home of Albrecht Dürer, the greatest Northern Renaissance master, whose creative genius inspired two generations of German artists. However, Dürer was only one of a host of extraordinary painters, printmakers, sculptors, and goldsmiths working in the city. Georg Pencz, Hans and Barthel Beham, Hans Schäufelein, Jost Amman, and Hans Lautensack were among the most accomplished printmakers of the day. Veit Stoss, Adam Kraft, Peter Flötner, and the Vischer family dominated early sixteenth-century German sculpture. Goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer was rivaled only by Florentine master Benvenuto Cellini in his inventiveness and technical virtuosity.
This remarkably comprehensive volume is the first English-language examination of Nuremberg at its creative peak. Following a mapping of the city's principal landmarks, Guy Fitch Lytle provides a compact historical background for Jeffrey Chipps Smith's detailed discussions of the city's social and artistic history. Smith examines the religious function of art before and during the Reformation to demonstrate the magnitude of the cultural transformations that resulted from the adoption of Lutheranism in 1525. He considers the early manifestations of humanism in Nuremberg and its influence on the art of Dürer and his contemporaries, and he reviews the central role of Dürer's pedagogical ideas and his workshop in the dissemination of Renaissance artistic concepts. Finally, Smith surveys the principal artists and stylistic trends in Nuremberg from 1500 to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618.
Nuremberg: A Renaissance City, 1500-1618 is the permanent record of an exhibition organized by the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery as part of the centennial celebration of the University of Texas at Austin. As such, it represents not only a thorough introduction to the cultural heritage of Nuremberg during its period of greatest glory but also a catalogue of the more than two hundred objects borrowed for the exhibition from public and private collections in the United States, Canada, and Germany. The catalogue contains biographical sketches of forty-five major artists of the period. Over three hundred illustrations depict the city and its most magnificent artistic treasures.
Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art
A Critical AnthologyArlene Dávila and Yasmin Ramirez, editors
Duke University Press, 2025
With: Néstor David Pastor, Gabriel Magraner, and Nikki Myers
Contributors. Joseph Anthony Cáceres, Taína Caragol, Arnaldo M. Cruz-Malavé, Deborah Cullen-Morales, Arlene Dávila, Kerry Doran, Elizabeth Ferrer, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, Al Hoyos-Twomey, Teréz Iacovino, Johnny Irizarry, Johana Londoño, Urayoán Noel, Néstor David Pastor, Yasmin Ramirez, Melissa M. Ramos Borges, Raquel Reichard, Rojo Robles, Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos, Wilson Valentín-Escobar
neckbone
visual versesavery r. young; foreword by Theaster Gates
Northwestern University Press, 2019