"Now, with "The making of the American essay' the editor includes selections ranging from Anne Bradstreet's secular prayers to Washington Irving's satires, Emily Dickinson's love letters to Kenneth Goldsmith's catalog's, Gertrude Stein's portraits to James Baldwin's and Norman Mailer's mediations on boxing. In this volume the editor uncovers new stories in the American essay's past and shows us that some of the most fiercely daring writers in the American literary canon have turned to the essay in order to produce some of our culture's most exhilarating art."-- book jacket.
The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who in centuries past have spoken up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of.
What is art history? Why, how and where did it originate, and how have its aims and methods changed over time? The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century,debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be. This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field''s most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner,Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi''s introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake.His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field. From the pre-publication reviews: ''Until now, anthologies about the history of art have tended to be worthy yet inert, plotting a linear evolution from the great precursors (Vasari, Winckelmann) to the founding fathers of the modern discipline (Wolfflin, Riegl, Panofsky) to the achievements and refinements of today''s scholarship.The texts that Donald Preziosi has brought together provide something far more challenging: the juxtapositions and alignments between individual essays point the reader towards unresolved problems, ongoing debates, and paths not takenor not taken yet. In place of the consoling tale of intellectualprogress, the collection defamiliarizes the whole field, and opens up a space for radical reflection on its basic procedures and assumptions. Definitely the best introduction to art history currently available.'' Professor Norman Bryson, Harvard University ''Donald Preziosi has prepared an anthologyfrom the Greek, a collection of flowersof art history. His bouquet contains representatives from the discipline''s two-hundred year history, arranged in standard and innovative methodological categories. Within each, the readings selected providestimulating congruencies and contradictions that will inspire productive debate and contemplation. But what makes this anthology more than an arresting assemblage is the author''s critical stance toward what he has wrought. His introduction and concluding chapter write around and under the subjectspresented, emphasizing the ''art'' of art history, its kinship with modernity''s post-Enlightenment project, and its collaboration with the rise of nationalism. Thus the discipline''s past is probed and questioned and made relevant for its present and future. The whole thereby addresses, withouthealing or concealing, the disciplinary ruptures of modernism. The book might also have explored further nature of art history''s history within the emergent discourse of post-colonialism and the globalization of culture Yet the many new perspectives it does offer help to re-present the discipline for its readers, students, teachers, and curators, for other areas of humanistic inquiry, which are being subject to similar critiques, and for artists and the larger art community, for whom history, narrative, and anaccounting of art''s past have once again become vital issues'' Professor Robert S. Nelson, Professor of Art History and Chair, Committee for the History of Culture, University of Chicago ''Rather than focusing on its Vasarian moment or on the later academic institutionalization of art history in the 19th and 20th centuries, Donald Preziosi, in The Art of Art History, constructs a reading of this hegemonic and reductive practice of making ''the visible legible'' as one that isinextricably tied to the museographic paradigm of late 18th and early 19th centuries. This shift, he sees as equivalent in importance to the brought by the ''invention'' of perspective. But the author goes further than to underline the implication of art history with the premises of modernity, hemakes a strong case, in a vivid and inspiring prose, for a tighter equation between art history and modernity: an equation grounded in his insightful considerations (and meteoric formulations) of the epistemological setting, rhetorical operations political (colonialist) aims and schizophrenic yetall-invasive aestheticization of knowledge that, in the last two centuries, have fashioned what we will no longer dare to call the discipline of art history. The result is a flamboyant book that offers anything but a celebratory reading of art history. It does not constitute an articulation of canonical texts or an up-to-date menu of art historical currents, methods, or trends. Yet it manages to avoid none of these dimensions. Art history is notenvisages as the learned discourse of modernity on a specific class of objects nor is it reduced to a genealogy of outstanding artist-subjects and their volatile constellations of contemporary subjects-readers. It becomes a practice wherein objects and subjects relate and relations oftencrystallize, under the unrecognized aegis of the fetish, this Other of art, since Preziosi concisely defines art as ''the anti-fetish fetish''. Far from the fantastic neutrality that is traditionally found in the format of such an historiographic endeavour, Preziosi frames his selection of text andthreads through them with an array of different strategic voices, superimposed (to stress a spatial figure he is keen to discern) in order to elaborate a strong polemic position that situates art history as an enduring and well disguised fictional genre. In the process, the author courageouslytakes on the paradox that is at the core of his project: to introduce students to the coming out o art history... as art, one that is not necessarily meant to be our coming out of it but that certainly well establishes our motives to continue to shake its grounds and its multi-storied apparatus.'' Professor Johanne Lamoureux, University of Montreal.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is semi-autobiographical, following Joyce's fictional alter-ego through his artistic awakening. The young artist Steven Dedelus begins to rebel against the Irish Catholic dogma of his childhood and discover the great philosophers and artists. He follows his artistic calling to the continent.
For decades now, the story of art in America has been dominated by New York. It gets the majority of attention, the stories of its schools and movements and masterpieces the stuff of pop culture legend. Chicago, on the other hand . . . well, people here just get on with the work of making art. Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, László Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book—in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells—doesn’t follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city’s institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments—such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus—are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable recognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as—or resist identifying as—a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor—and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city’s artistic heritage. Part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, which will bring major arts events to venues throughout Chicago in 2018, Art in Chicago is a landmark publication, a book that will be the standard account of Chicago art for decades to come. No art fan—regardless of their city—will want to miss it.
In A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso, Paul Barolsky explores the ways in which fiction shapes history and history informs fiction. It is a playful book about artistic obsession, about art history as both tragedy and farce, and about the heroic and the mock-heroic. The book demonstrates that the modern idea of the artist has deep roots in the image of the epic poet, from Homer to Ovid to Dante. Barolsky’s major claim is that the history of the artist is inseparable from historical fiction about the artist and that fiction is essential to the reality of the artist’s imagination.
