Contemporary Art in the Light of History

Contemporary Art in the Light of History

Author: Erwin Rosenthal

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-08-01

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1611459427

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Erwin Rosenthal’s Contemporary Art in the Light of History, originally published in 1971, is a small masterpiece of writing on the art of the twentieth century. A scholar of medieval art by training and a prominent antiquarian bookseller, Rosenthal, who died in l981, was equally entranced by modern art, particularly abstraction. His three linked essays in this book—“Contemporary Art in the Light of History,” “Art and Technology,” and “Art Theories and Manifestos, Old and New”—set out a path to understanding modern art through its affinities with the art of the past. Rosenthal engages with some of the enduring aesthetic questions: How do new forms and new artistic vocabularies respond to the deepest human needs and impulses? What is the relationship between artistic theory and artistic expression? Nicolas Poussin’s mythological landscapes, Paul Klee’s graphic abstractions, Bridget Riley’s op-art compositions—these and many other examples from centuries of painting, sculpture, poetry, and music take us, in these pages, on a fascinating cultural journey with a sophisticated and lucid guide. Rosenthal’s explorations of the theory and practice of twentieth-century artists bring us directly into the minds and studios of modern artists. What is more, like his previous The Changing Concept of Reality in Art, already republished by Arcade, this book invites us into a great intimacy with the origins of art.


Library of Light

Library of Light

Author: Jo Joelson

Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers Limited

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781848222533

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Library of Light brings together established and emerging practitioners who work with light, as material or subject, from theatre, music, performance, fine art, photography, film, public art, holography, digital media, architecture, and the built environment, together with curators, producers and other experts. Structured around twenty-five interviews and four thematic essays - Political Light, Mediating Light, Performance Light and Absent Light - the book aims to broaden our understanding of light as a creative medium and examines its impact on our cultural history and the role it plays in the new frontiers of art, design and technology. Illustrated with colour photographs and images of installations, sculptures, architectural projects, interventions in public space and works in virtual reality, the book includes interviews and contributions by: David Batchelor, Rana Begum, Robin Bell, Jason Bruges (Jason Bruges Studio), Anne Bean and Richard Wilson (The Bow Gamelan), Laura Buckley, Mário Caeiro, Paule Constable, Ernest Edmonds, Angus Farquhar (NVA), Rick Fisher, Susan Gamble and Michael Wenyon, Jon Hendricks, ISO Studio, Susan Hiller, Michael Hulls and Russell Maliphant, Cliff Lauson, Chris Levine, Michael Light, Joshua Lightshow, Liliane Lijn, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Manu Luksch, Mark Major (Speirs + Major), Helen Marriage (Artichoke), Anthony McCall, Gustav Metzger, Haroon Mirza, Yoko Ono, Katie Paterson, Andrew Pepper, Mark Titchner, Andi Watson.


The Annotated Mona Lisa, Third Edition

The Annotated Mona Lisa, Third Edition

Author: Carol Strickland

Publisher: Annotated

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781449482138

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Presents the history of art from prehistoric times to the present day, describes major artists and movements, and details the influence of art on society through the ages.


Author:

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published:

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1000606228

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Since '45

Since '45

Author: Katy Siegel

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1780232381

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Since ’45 details the collision of American history and modern art. Since World War II, New York has been the indisputable center of the art world, and as Katy Siegel shows, it has had a profound influence on the preoccupations that contemporary art would come to have. Tracing art history over the past decades, she shows how anxieties over race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction have supplanted the legacy of European artistic traditions. Siegel’s study encompasses a variety of works, including Rothko’s planes of color, Warhol’s serial silkscreens, Richard Prince’s cowboys, Robert Longo’s Men in Cities, Faith Ringgold’s Black Light, and Laurie Simmons’s dollhouses, and moves fluidly from discussions of artists’ works, art museums, and galleries to cultural influences and significant historical events. Rather than arguing on nationalist grounds or viewing American culture as representative of a now-devalued nation, Siegel explores how American culture dominated not only American artists but created conditions that now, after the full globalization of the art world, affect artists around the world. Since ’45 will interest all readers engaged in post-war and contemporary art in the United States and beyond.


After the End of Art

After the End of Art

Author: Arthur C. Danto

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0691209308

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The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary art A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible. An insightful and entertaining exploration of art’s most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.


Artificial Darkness

Artificial Darkness

Author: Noam M. Elcott

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-05-30

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 022632897X

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This ambitious study explores how important darkness--artificial darkness--was, as an actual technology, in producing not just photographs but visual novelties and experiments in cinema in the nineteenth century. The study plays out against a backdrop of urban history, where most scholars have focused on the growth of artificial light and the electrification of cities. Elcott’s study challenges that approach. In considering zones of darkness, it ranges from the sites of production (darkrooms, studios) to those of reception (theaters/cinemas/arcades) that shaped modern media and perceptions. He argues that, in the nineteenth century, the avant-garde was often less interested in the filmed image than in everything surrounding it: the screen, the projected light, the darkness, the experience of disembodiment. He argues that darkness has a history separate from night, evil, or the color black, and has a specifically modern manifestation as a media technology. We are all aware of the "velvet light trap” in photography, but at the heart of this book are technologies of darkness crucial to cinema that were commonly known as "the black screen,” but have, over time, faded from the storied discourse.


The Art of Looking

The Art of Looking

Author: Lance Esplund

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0465094678

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A veteran art critic helps us make sense of modern and contemporary art The landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years: from Malevich's 1915 painting of a single black square and Duchamp's 1917 signed porcelain urinal to Jackson Pollock's midcentury "drip" paintings; Chris Burden's "Shoot" (1971), in which the artist was voluntarily shot in the arm with a rifle; Urs Fischer's "You" (2007), a giant hole dug in the floor of a New York gallery; and the conceptual and performance art of today's Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramovic. The shifts have left the art-viewing public (understandably) perplexed. In The Art of Looking, renowned art critic Lance Esplund demonstrates that works of modern and contemporary art are not as indecipherable as they might seem. With patience, insight, and wit, Esplund guides us through the last century of art and empowers us to approach and appreciate it with new eyes. Eager to democratize genres that can feel inaccessible, Esplund encourages viewers to trust their own taste, guts, and common sense. The Art of Looking will open the eyes of viewers who think that recent art is obtuse, nonsensical, and irrelevant, as well as the eyes of those who believe that the art of the past has nothing to say to our present.