The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed." The human appreciation for art is innate, and certain artistic values are unive...

Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist who is considered to be one of France's best known writers.This collection contains all 8 of his novels and a short story:Hans of IcelandBug-JargalThe Last Day of a Condemned ManThe Hunchback of Notre DameClaude GueuxLes MisérablesToilers of the SeaThe Man Who LaughsNinety-Three

"A gem. . . . An unforgettable account of one of the great moments in the history of human thought." —Steven PinkerProbing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning— and brought him to the edge of madness.

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, What Art Is challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as o...

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesWriting in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimatel...

A Beautiful Anarchy is a vulnerable, honest, and insightful book about the human longing to create, whether you’re creating a family, a business, a book, or a photograph. Your greatest creation can be an intentional life lived on your own terms. What is our life but a chance to make the greatest art of all?If you already identify as a creative person, this book is an invitation to more intentionally explore your creative process. If you've ever said, “But ...

From Picasso's Cubism and Duchamp's readymades to Warhol's silkscreens and Smithson's earthworks, the art of the twentieth century broke completely with earlier artistic traditions. A basic change in the market for advanced art produced a heightened demand for innovation, and young conceptual innovators – from Picasso and Duchamp to Rauschenberg and Warhol to Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst – responded not only by creating dozens of new forms of art, but also by behaving in ways that would ...

Cold War Expressionism is an expose of the art world after World War II where a new triumphalism and a growing conservatism on the part of the US helped bring to power a depoliticized art which went under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism and which functioned as an advertisement for American capitalism while erasing the social impulses of prior European Modernisms and the American Social Expressionists of the 1930s and mid-1940s.This book details how more socially aware forms of ...

The Situationist International were a group of anti-authoritarian, highly cultured, revolutionary artists whose energy and enragement fundamentally shaped the revolutions of the late 1960's, most famously in Paris in May '68. They took on their shoulders the history of the workers' struggle, saw that it had been corrupted by authoritarianism and transformed it, with influences incorporating the avant-garde via Dada and Surrealism. They were not Marxologists, defenders of the faith. Marxism...

The focus of this book is on the birth and historical development of permutation statistical methods from the early 1920s to the near present. Beginning with the seminal contributions of R.A. Fisher, E.J.G. Pitman, and others in the 1920s and 1930s, permutation statistical methods were initially introduced to validate the assumptions of classical statistical methods.Permutation methods have advantages over classical methods in that they are optimal for small data sets and non-rando...

Making Sense utilises art practice as a pro-active way of thinking that helps us to make sense of the world. It does this by developing an applied understanding of how we can use art as a method of healing and as a critical method of research. Drawing from poststructuralist philosophy, psychoanalysis, arts therapies, and the creative processes of a range of contemporary artists, the book appeals to the fields of art theory, the arts therapies, aesthetics and art practice, whilst i...

From majestic Celtic crosses to elaborate knotwork designs, visual symbols of Irish identity at its most medieval abound in contemporary culture. Consdering both scholarly and popular perspectives this book offers a commentary on the blending of pasts and presents that finds permanent visualization in these contemporary signs.