Product Description: In The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, Catherine Dossin challenges the now-mythic perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition...read more

Product Description: In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (1899--1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass...read more

Product Description: The Graphic Art of the Underground: A Countercultural History takes the reader on a dazzling journey through the visual art and design of alternative and youth cultures from the 1950s to the present day.Ian Lowey and Suzy Prince's compelling account draws upon the work of an array of artistic figures – many of whose lives have proved as colourful as their work – such as Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, Kenny 'Von Dutch' Howard, Robert Williams, Robert Crumb, Martin Sharp, Jamie Reid, Linder Sterling, Gee Vaucher, Winston Smith, Barney Bubbles, Mark Ryden, Shag, Camille Rose Garcia, Marion Peck and Pete Fowler among numerous others...read more

Product Description: Over the past twenty years, the network has come to dominate the art world, affecting not just interaction among art professionals but the very makeup of the art object itself. The hierarchical and restrictive structure of the museum has been replaced by temporary projects scattered across the globe, staffed by free agents hired on short-term contracts, viewed by spectators defined by their predisposition to participate and make connections...read more

Product Description: This book will be an original and indispensable resource for all who believe in the importance of art in the wider educational realm. Framing the recent "educational turn" in the arts within a broad historical and social context, this anthology raises fundamental questions about how and what should be taught in an era of distributive rather than media-based practices...read more

Product Description: 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 have been incomprehensible to their predecessors...read more

Product Description: Art mirrors life; life returns the favor. How could nineteenth and twentieth century technologies foster both the change in the world view generally called «postmodernism» and the development of new art forms? Scholar and curator Faye Ran shows how interactions of art and technology led to cultural changes and the evolution of Installation art as a genre unto itself - a fascinating hybrid of expanded sculpture in terms of context, site, and environment, and expanded theatre in terms of performer, performance, and public...read more

Product Description: The relationship between art and social and political change is not only a highly topical area of current debate, it is also fundamental to the history of modern art. This volume gathers together for the first time the essential texts that have defined this area since the late nineteenth century...read more

Product Description: “Don’t start an art collective until you read this book.” —Guerrilla Girls “Ever since Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks the art of collaboration is back on the agenda. Collectivism after Modernism convincingly proves that art collectives did not stop after the proclaimed death of the historical avant-gardes...read more

Product Description: Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives...read more

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work. (view table of contents)

Following World War I, a new artistic-social avant-garde emerged with the ambition to engage the artist in the building of social life. Through close readings of the works of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and László Moholy-Nagy whose careers covered a broad range of artistic practices and political situations, Victor Margolin examines the way these three artists negotiated the changing relations between their social ideals and the political realities they confronted. Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to the understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity."An ambitious effort. This book puts the masters of European Modernism into perfect focus as inventors, propagators, and practitioners of a visual language that continues to hold sway over contemporary graphic style."—Steven Heller"Worth the wait. . . . Margolin usefully presents what he calls the 'failed hope' of this movement in this valuable effort."—Publishers Weekly

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Modern Art and Society an Anthology of Social and Multicultural Readings: An Anthology of Social and Multicultural Readings

A comprehensive and enlightening survey of works of art by artists once considered outside the mainstream--including African Americans, feminists, Hispanic Americans, and homosexuals--traces how these groups have come to prominence and revolutionized the art world.

Product Description: Book by Beck, James