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What is art? The contributors to Theories of Art Today  address the assertion that the term “art” no longer holds meaning. They explore a variety of issues including: aesthetic and institutional theories of art, feminist perspectives on the philosophy of art, the question of whether art is a cluster concept, and the relevance of tribal art to philosophical aesthetics. Contributors to this book include such distinguished philosophers and historians as Arthur Danto, Joseph Margolis, and George Dickie.

The first English translation of a radical and influential theory of art by a leader of Poland’s avant-garde

After World War II, socialist realism became the official state doctrine of art in Poland, with abstract works deemed counterrevolutionary and forbidden from public view. Władysław Strzemiński, a leader of the Polish constructivist avant-garde, developed a treatise of visual consciousness as a foundation for progressive art, emphasizing art’s autonomy. His application of Marxist aesthetics to the physiology of seeing is expressed in Theory of Seeing, which was published posthumously in 1958 by his students from notes collected from his lectures.

Preceding the comparable perspectives developed by Jacques Rancière, David Hockney, and John Berger, and even the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Strzemiński’s Theory of Seeing introduces the radical and groundbreaking ideas of one of Poland’s most important artists to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

What is "art"? Why have human societies through all time and around the globe created those objects we call works of art? Is there any way of defining art that can encompass everything from Paleolithic objects to the virtual images created by the latest computer technology? Questions such as these have preoccupied Esther Pasztory since the beginning of her scholarly career. In this authoritative volume, she distills four decades of research and reflection to propose a pathbreaking new way of understanding what art is and why human beings create it that can be applied to all cultures throughout time.

At its heart, Pasztory's thesis is simple and yet profound. She asserts that humans create things (some of which modern Western society chooses to call "art") in order to work out our ideas—that is, we literally think with things. Pasztory draws on examples from many societies to argue that the art-making impulse is primarily cognitive and only secondarily aesthetic. She demonstrates that "art" always reflects the specific social context in which it is created, and that as societies become more complex, their art becomes more rarefied.

Pasztory presents her thesis in a two-part approach. The first section of the book is an original essay entitled "Thinking with Things" that develops Pasztory's unified theory of what art is and why we create it. The second section is a collection of eight previously published essays that explore the art-making process in both Pre-Columbian and Western societies. Pasztory's work combines the insights of art history and anthropology in the light of poststructuralist ideas. Her book will be indispensable reading for everyone who creates or thinks about works of art.

A major reevaluation of collaboration’s role in art since 1968.

The lone artist is a worn cliché of art history but one that still defines how we think about the production of art. Since the 1960s, however, a number of artists have challenged this image by embarking on long-term collaborations that dramatically altered the terms of artistic identity. In The Third Hand, Charles Green offers a sustained critical examination of collaboration in international contemporary art, tracing its origins from the evolution of conceptual art in the 1960s into such stylistic labels as Earth Art, Systems Art, Body Art, and Performance Art. During this critical period, artists around the world began testing the limits of what art could be, how it might be produced, and who the artist is. Collaboration emerged as a prime way to reframe these questions.

A pioneering exploration of how poetry and experimental cinema intersect to reconstruct meaning across visual and linguistic forms.

As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies.

The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. At the same time, Child's films are noted for their incisive political commentary on issues such as gender and sexuality, class, voyeurism, poverty, and the subversive nature of propaganda.

In the essays of This Is Called Moving, Child draws on her long career as a practicing poet as well as a filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross-fertilize her work. For Child, poetry and film are both potent means of representation, and by examining the parallels between them—words and frames, lines and shots, stanzas and scenes—she discovers how the two art forms re-construct and re-present social meaning, both private and collective.

A close-up history of the Yugoslav artists who broke down the boundaries between public and private

 

In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb took to using the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. This Is Not My World presents a detailed account of the Group of Six Authors and their circle in the prolific and experimental period from 1975 to 1985, highlighting the friction between public and private that underlied their innovative practices. 

Looking to circumvent the rigid bureaucracy of official art institutions, this freewheeling group of conceptual artists and their peers brought artistic activities directly to an unwitting public by staging provocative performances, exhibiting artworks, and interacting with passersby on the streets. Exploring artworks such as Vlasta Delimar’s act of tying herself to a tree in a busy pedestrian area, Željko Jerman’s production of a giant banner declaring “Intimate Inscription” in the city’s central square, and Vlado Martek’s creation of an artwork on a seaside beach using women’s underwear, Adair Rounthwaite examines the work of these artists as a site of tension between the intimacy of artistic expression and the political structure of the public sphere under state socialism. 

Whereas many histories of modern and contemporary art in formerly socialist countries tend to be dominated by discussions of ideology and resistance, This Is Not My World focuses its attention on the affective aspects of the group’s activities, using artist interviews and extensive documentation to bring the reader closer to the felt experience of their public interventions. Situating the group’s work within the context of broader developments in conceptualism and theories of the avant-garde, Rounthwaite provides a fresh consideration and newly detailed account of this marginalized episode in global art history.

An exploration of what it means when we say something is beautiful.

Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, François Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonly agreed-upon definition of what is beautiful and offers a new way of beholding art. Jullien argues that the Western concept of beauty was established by Greek philosophy and became consequently embedded within the very structure of European languages. And due to its relationship to language, this concept has determined ways of thinking about beauty that often go unnoticed or unchecked in discussions of Western aesthetics. Moreover, through globalization, Western ideals of beauty have even spread to cultures whose ancient traditions are based upon radically different aesthetic foundations; yet, these cultures have adopted such views without question and without recognizing the cultural assumptions they contain.

Tom Blackwell (1938–2020) is primarily known for his work in Photorealism, a stylistic movement noted for its ardent embrace of photographic source material. In 1969, he began a series of brashly beautiful motorcycle paintings that established him as one of the founders and foremost artists of the movement. The myriad painterly possibilities of urban store windows became another abiding interest. In his store-window paintings, Blackwell captures the counterpoint between the idealized reality within the store display and the bustling urban life reflected in the glass. As author Linda Chase remarks, "The magic of these paintings resides in the artist's ability to transform the arbitrary photographic information into dynamic and complex artistic compositions, revealing and clarifying the image while preserving its mystery."

In conjunction with his Photorealist paintings, Blackwell has produced a related body of work that is allegorical in its perpective. Combining photo-derived images, he addresses themes such as the passage of time, the fragility of nature, and the continuity that weaves through human history. The paintings, rich in symbolism and interpretive possibilities, fascinate and impress viewers with the breadth of Blackwell's abilities. "As a painter, I have been interested in dealing with the formal issues involved in juxtaposed and overlapping images," he explains. "In my Photorealism work, my goal is to reveal something about the actual world and to explore our photo-mediated perceptions of it."

Blackwell, born in Chicago in 1938, has deftly captured the vibrancy and visual excitement of urban street life for the past four decades and has had solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Tom Blackwell: The Complete Paintings, 1970–2014 is a comprehensive study of the artist's work as well as his artistic development and process, and includes a compilation of his early paintings through to his most recent works.

Of Tom Slaughter, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented: "The quality of freshness, the familiar world re-seen, from the water towers of New York City to the rural pleasures of boating, is the most immediately arresting aspect of Tom Slaughter's art... Bold bright colors swiftly laid down echo with resonances: Léger and Stuart Davis, Raoul Dufy and Roy Lichtenstein." His work, with its seemingly effortless whimsy rendered with a strong sense of line, color, and rhythm, has also been compared to Matisse.

Slaughter's Pop-inflected drawings, prints, paintings, and illustrations convey his love of life as he relentlessly explored the complexities of the urban scene or the simple pleasures of boating. The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to publish Tom Slaughter, an extensive monograph of the artist's enormous body of work that celebrates his enduring optimism, personal and artistic honesty, and charming brashness in a landscape of pure joy.

Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, reveals Slaughter as a treasured friend whose artistry was fueled by endless curiosity about life's simple pleasures, a man who made his innumerable friends and acquaintances part of his personal community. Slaughter's lifelong friend, actor and writer David Marshall Grant, remembers the artist's delight when, in a high school art class, he was introduced to the mysteries of negative space and the enigmatic power it brings to an artwork. Artist, art critic, and independent curator Andy Fabo describes his friend's vibrant art as all about pleasure. Even in the most turbulent of times, he took a celebratory approach to his art, offering his viewers a sensual and visual delight. For Jon Robin Baitz, playwright and screenwriter, the "sweetness" of Slaughter's images was insistent, a compulsive scrutinizing of the visual world of small domesticities. Marthe Jocelyn, the artist's former wife and a children's book author and illustrator, reflects on the couple's acclaimed collaboration on a series of books for the very youngest readers. Jim Kempner, gallery owner, recalls Slaughter as a man of charm and enormous artistic talent who always managed to retain a childlike innocence. Artist George Negroponte remembers Slaughter as focusing on the life around him, especially his daughters, in a unique mixture of everyday images, abstracted yet conveying popular culture. And in an interview both informative and poignant, Slaughter's friends, artists Stephen Hannock, , Robert Harms, Ray Charles White, and Scott Kilgour pay tribute to a dear friend whose prolific career, though cut short, was remarkable for a visual language that makes his art accessible to everyone.

Of Tom Slaughter, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented: "The quality of freshness, the familiar world re-seen, from the water towers of New York City to the rural pleasures of boating, is the most immediately arresting aspect of Tom Slaughter's art... Bold bright colors swiftly laid down echo with resonances: Léger and Stuart Davis, Raoul Dufy and Roy Lichtenstein." His work, with its seemingly effortless whimsy rendered with a strong sense of line, color, and rhythm, has also been compared to Matisse.

Slaughter's Pop-inflected drawings, prints, paintings, and illustrations convey his love of life as he relentlessly explored the complexities of the urban scene or the simple pleasures of boating. The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to publish Tom Slaughter, an extensive monograph of the artist's enormous body of work that celebrates his enduring optimism, personal and artistic honesty, and charming brashness in a landscape of pure joy.

Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, reveals Slaughter as a treasured friend whose artistry was fueled by endless curiosity about life's simple pleasures, a man who made his innumerable friends and acquaintances part of his personal community. Slaughter's lifelong friend, actor and writer David Marshall Grant, remembers the artist's delight when, in a high school art class, he was introduced to the mysteries of negative space and the enigmatic power it brings to an artwork. Artist, art critic, and independent curator Andy Fabo describes his friend's vibrant art as all about pleasure. Even in the most turbulent of times, he took a celebratory approach to his art, offering his viewers a sensual and visual delight. For Jon Robin Baitz, playwright and screenwriter, the "sweetness" of Slaughter's images was insistent, a compulsive scrutinizing of the visual world of small domesticities. Marthe Jocelyn, the artist's former wife and a children's book author and illustrator, reflects on the couple's acclaimed collaboration on a series of books for the very youngest readers. Jim Kempner, gallery owner, recalls Slaughter as a man of charm and enormous artistic talent who always managed to retain a childlike innocence. Artist George Negroponte remembers Slaughter as focusing on the life around him, especially his daughters, in a unique mixture of everyday images, abstracted yet conveying popular culture. And in an interview both informative and poignant, Slaughter's friends, artists Stephen Hannock, , Robert Harms, Ray Charles White, and Scott Kilgour pay tribute to a dear friend whose prolific career, though cut short, was remarkable for a visual language that makes his art accessible to everyone.

Proposes a revolutionary approach to the interpretation of art, film, and the digital.

In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself.

A dynamic contemporary examination of universalism

Gathering a selection of essays by influential theorist Boris Groys, Towards a New Universalism articulates his sustained engagement with the problem of universality under contemporary conditions shaped by globalization, institutional fragmentation, and digital mediation. Rather than defending classical universalism or abandoning it in favor of cultural particularism, Groys approaches universality as something produced within shared historical, institutional, and technological frameworks.

These essays address topics spanning from identity politics to migration, museums, media, and artificial intelligence, examining how universal claims make their way into social and cultural contexts. Distinct from recent philosophical treatments of universalism, Towards a New Universalism situates the question within aesthetics, media theory, and institutional critique, offering an indispensable collection for anyone interested in the intersections of politics and art.

Distributed for e-flux.

Transfigurements develops a framework for thinking about art through innovative readings of some of the most important philosophical writing on the subject by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. Sallis exposes new layers in their texts and theories while also marking their limits. By doing so, his aim is to show that philosophy needs to attend to art directly. Consequently, Sallis also addresses a wide range of works of art, including paintings by Raphael, Monet, and Klee; Shakespeare’s comedies; and the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, and Tan Dun. Through these interpretations, he puts forth a compelling new elaboration of the philosophy of art.