John O’Brian is professor of art history at the University of British Columbia.Jeremy Borsos is a visual artist whose exhibitions have been reviewed in Art in America and Canadian Art.

John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design combines 'need' and 'desire' in the form of a practical object that can also reflect the user's identity and aspirations through its form and decoration. This concise guide to contemporary design goes beyond style and taste to look at how differe...

The definitive biography of this brilliant polymath--director of the National Gallery, author, patron of the arts, social lion, and singular pioneer of television--that also tells the story of the arts in the twentieth century through his astonishing life.Kenneth Clark's thirteen-part 1969 television series, Civilisation, established him as a globally admired figure. Clark was prescient in making this series: the upheavals of the century, the Cold War amon...

From the postapocalyptic world of Blade Runner to theJames Cameron mega-hit Terminator, tech-noir has emerged as a distinct genre, with roots in both the Promethean myth and the earlier popular traditions of gothic, detective, and science fiction. In this new volume, many well-known film and literary works—including The Matrix, RoboCop, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—are discussed with reference to their relationship to tech-noir and one another. Featur...

In an era which has seen many forms of artistic creation becoming digitized, the practice of drawing, in the traditional sense, has remained constant. However, many publications about the relationship between drawing and thinking rely on discipline-dependent distinctions to discuss the activity’s function. Drawing: The Enactive Evolution of the Practitioner redefines drawing more holistically as an enactive phenomenon, and makes connections between a variety of disciplines in orde...

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...

An extensive, accessible guide to the most groundbreaking and influential art from 1989 to the presentThe years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 have seen the rise of a new freedom to define art—Who makes it? Where can it be found? What is its commercial value?—and, consequently, the reevaluation of art’s place in society.Kelly Grovier surveys the dynamic developments in art practice worldwide since 1989, focusing on artists whose fres...

Will Higbee is a senior lecturer in film studies and co-director of the Centre for Research in Film Studies at University of Exeter. He is the author of Matthieu Kassovitz.Sarah Leahy is a senior lecturer in French and film at Newcastle University. She is the author of Casque d'or.Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy are associate editors of Studies in French Cinema.

François Penz is an architect and a teacher in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art at the University of Cambridge.Andong Lu is a research associate at the University of Cambridge.

Since the 1990s, women artists have led the contemporary art world in the creation of art depicting female adolescence, producing challenging, critically debated and avidly collected artworks that are driving the current and momentous shift in the perception of women in art. Girls! Girls! Girls! presents essays from established and up-and-coming scholars who address a variety of themes, including narcissism, nostalgia, post-feminism and fantasy with the goal of approaching the ove...

Mika Kaurismäki’s films challenge many boundaries – national societies, genre formations, art/popular culture, fiction/documentary, humanity/nature and problematic distinctions between different zones of development. Synthesizing concepts from a range of thematic frameworks – e.g. auteurism, eco-philosophy, genre, cartography, cineaste networks, global reception, distribution and exhibition practices, and the potential of postnationalism – this book provides an interdisciplinary reading of...

Cultural production as we know it has been undergoing significant restructuring. In an effort to compensate for the global decline in economic growth, governments and corporations have begun to seriously consider the creative fields as markets that can be stimulated through venture capital and regional development initiatives. Along with the neoliberalization of cultural institutions, a conservative agenda that is buttressed by a war economy confronts critics and activists with the repress...