The Object Stares Back

The Object Stares Back

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780156004978

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A study on how our eyes function with our brains examines the irrational elements of physical sight and concludes that human seeing transforms both the viewer and the object being viewed.


The Object Stares Back

The Object Stares Back

Author: James Elkins

Publisher:

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 9780684800950

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A thoughtful study on how our eyes function with our brains examines the irrational elements of physical sight and concludes that human seeing transforms both the viewer and the object being viewed. 15,000 first printing.


Pictures and Tears

Pictures and Tears

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-08-02

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 113595013X

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This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.


How to Use Your Eyes

How to Use Your Eyes

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-08-20

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1135961603

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James Elkins's How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at--and maybe to see for the first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous.


Why Art Cannot Be Taught

Why Art Cannot Be Taught

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2001-05-17

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780252069505

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He also addresses the phenomenon of art critiques as a microcosm for teaching art as a whole and dissects real-life critiques, highlighting presuppositions and dynamics that make them confusing and suggesting ways to make them more helpful. Elkins's no-nonsense approach clears away the assumptions about art instruction that are not borne out by classroom practice. For example, he notes that despite much talk about instilling visual acuity and teaching technique, in practice neither teachers nor students behave as if those were their principal goals. He addresses the absurdity of pretending that sexual issues are absent from life-drawing classes and questions the practice of holding up great masters and masterpieces as models for students capable of producing only mediocre art. He also discusses types of art--including art that takes time to complete and art that isn't serious--that cannot be learned in studio art classes.


Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?

Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1135963568

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With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.


The Domain of Images

The Domain of Images

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780801487248

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In the domain of visual images, those of fine art form a tiny minority. This original and brilliant book calls upon art historians to look beyond their traditional subjects--painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking--to the vast array of "nonart" images, including those from science, technology, commerce, medicine, music, and archaeology. Such images, James Elkins asserts, can be as rich and expressive as any canonical painting. Using scores of illustrations as examples, he proposes a radically new way of thinking about visual analysis, one that relies on an object's own internal sense of organization.Elkins begins by demonstrating the arbitrariness of current criteria used by art historians for selecting images for study. He urges scholars to adopt, instead, the far broader criteria of the young field of image studies. After analyzing the philosophic underpinnings of this interdisciplinary field, he surveys the entire range of images, from calligraphy to mathematical graphs and abstract painting. Throughout, Elkins blends philosophic analysis with historical detail to produce a startling new sense of such basic terms as pictures, writing, and notation.


What Painting is

What Painting is

Author: James Elkins

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780415921138

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Here, Elkins argues that alchemists and painters have similar relationships to the substances they work with. Both try to transform the substance, while seeking to transform their own experience.


Navigating the Stars

Navigating the Stars

Author: Maria V. Snyder

Publisher: Maria V. Snyder

Published: 2018-12-01

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1946381020

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2019 PRISM Award Winner! “The answer is no, Lyra,” my mother utters her favorite—I swear—phrase. No means I have to travel with them to another planet—again. No means leaving all my friends fifty years in the past. Thanks, Einstein. Seventeen-year-old Lyra Daniels can’t truly blame Einstein or her parents for their impending move across the Milky Way Galaxy. It’s all due to the invention of the Q-net, which made traveling the vast distances in space possible—with one big caveat: the time dilation. But that never stopped Lyra's ancestors from exploring the Milky Way, searching for resources and exoplanets to colonize. What they didn’t expect to find is life-sized terracotta Warriors buried on twenty-one different exoplanets. ... Make that twenty-two. As the Galaxy’s leading experts on the Warriors, Lyra's parents are thrilled by the new discovery, sending them—and her—fifty years into the future. Her social life in ruins, she fills her lonely days by illegally worming into the Q-net. The only person close to her age is the annoyingly irresistible security officer who threatens to throw her into the brig. After the planet they just left goes silent—meaning no communications from them at all—security has bigger problems to deal with than Lyra, especially when vital data files go missing. But that's just the beginning, because they’re not as alone as they thought on their new planet... and suddenly time isn't the only thing working against them.


Rhetorics of Display

Rhetorics of Display

Author: Lawrence J. Prelli

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2021-12-24

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 1643362798

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Groundbreaking case studies mapping the rhetoric inherent in acts of presentation and concealment Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together a distinguished group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasive form of rhetorical activity. Editor Lawrence J. Prelli notes in his introduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. The volume provides an integrated, comprehensive study of the processes of selecting what to reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Surveying major historical transformations in the relationship between rhetoric and display, this book also identifies the leading themes in relevant scholarship of the past three decades. Seventeen case studies canvass a representative and diverse range of displays—from body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in gambling casinos—and examine the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences. Collectively the contributors shed light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.