The job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantly revising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance of the work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessment and reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the "post-medium condition" -- the abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. Jean-François Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is characterized by the end of a "master narrative," and Krauss sees in the post-medium condition of contemporary art a similar farewell to coherence. The master narrative of contemporary art ended when conceptual art and other contemporary practices jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work. For Krauss, this spells the end of serious art, and she devotes much of Perpetual Inventory to "wrest[ling] new media to the mat of specificity." Krauss also writes about artists who are reinventing the medium, artists who persevere in the service of a nontraditional medium ("strange new apparatuses" often adopted from commercial culture), among them Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, and James Coleman.

Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Marcel Duchamp form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a new avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. Each of them staged brash, even shocking, events and produced works that challenged the way the mainstream art world operated and thought about itself. Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist as a distinct, characteristic figure in that mapping. He sees in Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, the incarnation of the last of the proletarians; he carries forward Warhol’s desire to be a machine of mass production and draws the consequences for aesthetic theory; he calls Klein, who staked a claim on pictorial space as if it were a commodity, “The dead dealer”; and he reads Duchamp as the witty financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value. Throughout, de Duve expresses his view that the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy is a phenomenon that should be seen as central to modernity in art. Even more, de Duve shows that Marx—though perhaps no longer the “Marxist” Marx of yore—can still help us resist the current disenchantment with modernity’s many unmet promises. An intriguing look at these four influential artists, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx is an absorbing investigation into the many intertwined relationships between the economic and artistic realms.

Product Description: El presente libro ofrece un análisis completo de la obra de Luis Buñuel en su doble faceta de escritor y director de cine, abordado desde una perspectiva múltiple (histórico-cultural, literaria, cinematográfica). El autor hace especial hincapié, además de en su condición de exiliado, en las tres líneas fundamentales de su ...read more

Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media. These essays on nine women artists—gathered as Bachelors—are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work, such as the "part object" (Louise Bourgeois) or the "formless" (Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. In the work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of the work can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand. (view table of contents)

Was Pablo Picasso a modern Midas, who not only turned the trash of everyday life into the gold of cubist collage but, touching all of old-master art, gave it fabulous new value? Or was he a monster counterfeiter who mercilessly raided the styles of others? Arguing that counterfeit and genuine are not opposites but, instead, two sides of the same condition, Krauss brilliantly brings Picasso's work into focus as the "sublimated" underbelly of cubism itself .

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Gathers drawings and models for six house designs, shows the finished buildings, and offers the author's comments on architectural design

Explains why the artist switched from painting to sculpture, shows a selection of her works in steel, stone, and concrete, and discusses the influences on her sculpture

A collection of essays examining the nature of modern art includes discussions of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Smithson

Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present