American territorial borders have undergone significant and unparalleled changes in the last decade. They serve as a powerful and emotionally charged locus for American national identity that correlates with the historical idea of the frontier. But the concept of the frontier, so central to American identity throughout modern history, has all but disappeared in contemporary representation while the border has served to uncomfortably fill the void left in the spatial imagination of American...

A compelling, radical, “richly explored” (The New York Times Book Review) and “insightful” (Vanity Fair) collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from prizewinning novelist Siri Hustvedt, acclaimed author of The Blazing World and What I Loved.In this expansive volume, Hustvedt presents a trilogy of intellectually daring works that reveal the striking breadth of her knowledge across the human...

Within forty-eight hours in the fall of 2014, buyers in the Sotheby’s and Christie’s New York auction houses spent $1.7 billion on contemporary art. Non-taxed freeport warehouses around the globe are stacked with art held for speculation. One of Jeff Koons’ five chromium-plated stainless steel balloon dogs sold for 50 percent more at auction than the previous record for any living artist. A painting by Christopher Wool, featuring four lines from a Francis Ford Coppola movie stencilled in b...

One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practiceBad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers l...

9.5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art to the troubled status of "outsider" and street art to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself.Ben Davis currently lives and works in New York City where he is Executive Editor at Artinfo.

Cinema and Inter-American Relations studies the key role that commercial narrative films have played in the articulation of the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Latin America since the onset of the Good Neighbor policy (1933). Pérez Melgosa analyzes the evolution of inter-American narratives in films from across the continent, highlights the social effects of the technologies used to produce these works, and explores the connections of cinema to su...

The international controversy over who "owns" antiquities has pitted museums against archaeologists and source countries where ancient artifacts are found. In his book Who Owns Antiquity?, James Cuno argued that antiquities are the cultural property of humankind, not of the countries that lay exclusive claim to them. Now in Whose Culture?, Cuno assembles preeminent museum directors, curators, and scholars to explain for themselves what's at stake in this struggle--and why...

American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age examines the recent challenges to the conventions of realist documentary through the lens of war documentary films by Ken Burns, Michael Moore, and Errol Morris. During the twentieth century, the invention of new technologies of audiovisual representation such as cinema, television, video, and digital media have transformed the modes of historical narration and with it forced historians to assess the impact of new visual technolog...

The conclusion of the Cold War in 1989 signalled the beginning of a new era in Eastern Europe, and this widespread change was felt no less strongly in the world of art. In Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, Piotr Piotrowski examines the art made after 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe in light of the profound political, social, economic and cultural transformations in the region.As well as discussing these alterations, Piotrowski describes the changing nature of ...

As a recording device, photography plays a unique role in how we remember places and events that happened there. This includes recording events as they happen, or recording places where something occurred before the photograph was taken, commonly referred to as aftermath photography. This book presents a theoretical and historical analysis of German photography of place after 1945. It analyses how major historical ruptures in twentieth-century Germany and associated places of trauma, memor...

The Ghent Altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is a 15th century polyptych painted by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck. One of its twenty panels was stolen from St. Bavon Cathedral in Ghent on the night of April 10, 1934. What happened to the panel is an enduring art mystery that spans the twentieth century and after. Completed in 1432 the masterpiece was taken by the French in 1794 for display in the then new Louvre Museum. King Louis XVII returned it to Ghent. It was partitioned once more, ...

Signal is an ongoing book series dedicated to documenting and sharing compelling graphics, art projects, and cultural movements of international resistance and liberation struggles. Artists and cultural workers have been at the center of upheavals and revolts the world over, from the painters and poets in the Paris Commune to the poster makers and street theatre performers of the recent Occupy movement. Signal will bring these artists and their work to a new audience, dig...