This edited volume explores the notion of “artifice” in modern visual culture, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, in countries around the globe.Artifice has been regarded as a primarily Western phenomenon, playing as it does a central role in European art theory since the Renaissance. This volume proposes that artifice is better understood as a transcultural artistic phenomenon and requires far broader conceptualization across international contexts. It acquaints r...

This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his "Character Heads." These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art. Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculp...

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms—and things that originate from living organisms— enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take pla...

While the connected, international character of today's art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century.Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a seri...

An award-winning cultural history of how we experience the world through art, film and architectureAtlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavor to map the cultural terrain of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative blend of words and pictures, Giuliana Bruno emphasizes the connections between “sight” and “site” and “motion” and “emotion.” In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Louise Bourgeois, the filmmaking of Peter Greenaway and Michel...

Drawing on field research in Namibia and the Solomon Islands and case studies of international organizations such as USAID and Oxfam Suzan Ilcan and Anita Lacey argue that aid programs have forged new understandings of poverty that are more about governing the poor through neo-liberal reforms than providing just solutions to poverty. By analyzing these programs they reveal that concepts of privatization empowerment and partnership are tools that treat the poor as a governed entity within a sy...

The first book-length art historical examination of a major contemporary French artist.Over the past two decades, French artist Pierre Huyghe has produced an extraordinary body of work in constant dialogue with temporality. Investigating the possibility of a hypothetical mode of timekeeping—“parallel presents”—Huyghe has researched the architecture of the incomplete, directed a puppet opera, founded a temporary school, established a pirate television station, stage...

Francesco Casetti believes new media technologies are producing an exciting new era in cinema aesthetics. Whether we experience film in the theater, on our hand-held devices, in galleries and museums, onboard and in flight, or up in the clouds in the bits we download, cinema continues to alter our habits and excite our imaginations.Casetti travels from the remote corners of film history and theory to the most surprising sites on the internet and in our cities to prove the ongoing r...

Close readings of ostensibly “blank” works—from unprinted pages to silent music—that point to a new understanding of media.In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and t...

A Renaissance is underway. It can be seen as a response to environmental, societal and ethical issues so acute that human survival is in question. Artistic, philosophical and political, it builds on the scientific revolutions of the last decades and positions itself in relation to technoscientific and transhumanist promises. Within this Wild Renaissance, man no longer positions himself as master and owner, imposing his will on a passive and purposeless nature. He makes ready to listen to a...

Jacques Derrida remains a leading voice of philosophy, his works still resonating today—and for more than three decades, one of the main sites of Derridean deconstruction has been the arts. Collecting nineteen texts spanning from 1979 to 2004, Thinking out of Sight brings to light Derrida's most inventive ideas about the making of visual artworks.The book is divided into three sections. The first demonstrates Derrida's preoccupation with visibility, image, and space. The se...

Winner of the 2019 CHOICE Award"The authoritative book on the origins, history, and influence of illustration. Bravo!" David Brinley, University of Delaware, USAHistory of Illustration covers image-making and print history from around the world, spanning from the ancient to the modern. Hundreds of color images show illustrations within their social, cultural, and technical context, while they are ordered f...