A veteran art critic helps us make sense of modern and contemporary artThe 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 ...

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 ...

As public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of Tate Modern and the Bilbao Guggenheim, there is a real need for a book that will engage general readers, offering them not only information and ideas about modern art, but also explaining its contemporary relevance and history. This book achieves all this and focuses on interrogating the idea of 'modern' art by asking such questions as: What has made a work of art qualify as modern (or f...

As the art world eagerly embraces a journalistic approach, Aesthetic Journalism explores why contemporary art exhibitions often consist of interviews, documentaries and reportage. This new mode of journalism is grasping more and more space in modern culture and Cramerotti probes the current merge of art with the sphere of investigative journalism. The attempt to map this field, here defined as ‘Aesthetic Journalism’, challenges, with clear language, the definitions of both art and journali...

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images—photographs, films, videos, press images...

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This third volume in the series, What Do Artists Know?, is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized...

Mark Rothko (1903–1970), world-renowned icon of Abstract Expressionism, is rediscovered in this wholly original examination of his art and life written by his son. Synthesizing rigorous critique with personal anecdotes, Christopher, the younger of the artist’s two children, offers a unique perspective on this modern master.   Christopher Rothko draws on an intimate knowledge of the artworks to present eighteen essays that look closely at the paintings and explore the ways in whic...

In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic cris...

In this landmark work, Jed Perl captures the excitement of a generation of legendary artists–Jackson Pollack, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly among them–who came to New York, mingled in its lofts and bars, and revolutionized American art. In a continuously arresting narrative, Perl also portrays such less well known figures as the galvanic teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan Mitchell, and the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, as well the writer...

“If John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a classic of art criticism, looking at the ‘what’ of art, then David Salle’s How to See is the artist’s reply, a brilliant series of reflections on how artists think when they make their work. The ‘how’ of art has perhaps never been better explored.” —Salman RushdieHow does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle’s incisive essay collection il...

Collaborative and collective art practices have proliferated around the world over the past fifteen years. In The One and the Many, Grant H. Kester provides an overview of the broader continuum of collaborative art, ranging from the work of artists and groups widely celebrated in the mainstream art world, such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Superflex, Francis Alÿs, and Santiago Sierra, to the less-publicized projects of groups, such as Park Fiction in Hamburg, Networking and Initiatives fo...

The first biography of visionary artist Agnes Martin, one of the most original and influential painters of the postwar periodOver the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin’s austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be...