Traditionally sight has been the only sense with a ticket to enter the museum. The same is true of histories of art, in which artworks are often presented as purely visual objects. In The Museum of the Senses Constance Classen offers a new way of approaching the history of art through the senses, revealing how people used to handle, smell and even taste collection pieces. Topics range from the tactile power of relics to the sensuous allure of cabinets of curiosities, and from the ...

The 19th century was a time of new sensory experiences and modes of perception. The raucous mechanical intensity of the train and the factory vied for attention with the dazzling splendour of department stores and world fairs. Colonization and trade carried European sensations and sensibilities to the world and, in turn, flooded the West with exotic sights and savours. Urban stench became a matter of urgent public concern. Photography created a compelling alternate reality accessible only ...

A collection of simple - and surprisingly relevant - tools from great thinkers throughout history.Focusing on important ideas from Western and Eastern philosophy, sociology, psychotherapy, art, architecture, and literature, this collection of wisdom and insight includes everyone from well know thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Lao Tzu to more unexpected names like Coco Chanel and St Benedict.With original color illustrations for each featured thinker, this bo...

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, r...

Who was Jacques Derrida? For some, he is responsible, at least in part, for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to 'little more than an object of ridicule'. For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event Perhaps, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and ur...

Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they...

Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future.Francis O'Gorman shows how forgetting has been embraced as a requirement for modern existence and how our education, as well as life with fast-moving technology, further disconnects us from our pasts. But he also examines the cultural narratives that urge us...

Herbert Read was a maverick character in the cultural life of the twentieth century. A radical leader of the avant garde in the 1930s, and an anarchist revolutionary during the war years, by the time of his death in 1968 he had become a key figure at the heart of the British cultural establishment. To Hell with Culture offers readers an ideal overview of the ideas that marked out this seminal and hugely influential thinker. It is a controversial work that engages the reader in a w...

Ways of Sensing is a stimulating exploration of the cultural, historical and political dimensions of the world of the senses. The book spans a wide range of settings and makes comparisons between different cultures and epochs, revealing the power and diversity of sensory expressions across time and space. The chapters reflect on topics such as the tactile appeal of medieval art, the healing power of Navajo sand paintings, the aesthetic blight of the modern hospital, the role of th...

Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch—as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today.Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing “flea”-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense.As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent o...

‘Ugly as sin’, ‘ugly duckling’, ‘rear its ugly head’. The word ‘ugly’ is used freely, yet it is a loaded term: from the simply plain and unsightly to the repulsive and even offensive, definitions slide all over the place. Hovering around ‘feared and dreaded’, ugliness both repels and fascinates. But the concept of ugliness has a lineage that has long haunted our cultural imagination.In this riveting book, Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ...

with essays by Jean Baudrillard, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Nicholas Thomas, Mieke Bal, John Forrester, John Windsor, Naomi Schor, Susan Stewart, Anthony Alan Shelton, Jaś Elsner, Roger Cardinal and an interview with Robert Opie.This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the ‘Other’ and the marginal – the ephemeral, exotic...