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Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal experience, professional expertise and sympathy.
The White Review Anthology collects the best fiction and non-fiction published in the magazine's seven-year history, including work by Anne Carson, Chris Kraus, China Mieville, Samanta Schweblin and Lauren Elkin.
'A scathing, lively and timely look at the "European city", from one of our most provocative voices on culture and architecture today' Owen Jones A searching, timely account of the condition of contemporary Europe, told through the landscapes of its cities Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. In Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European ci...
Why is this art? The world of contemporary art can seem intimidating, absurd, and self-obsessed, while the sums of money exchanged are baffling. Writing on contemporary art is often tortured and confused, ignoring the important questions: What is contemporary art? How does it relate to money and power? How is it made? Will it survive? To answer these questions, Katya Tylevich and Ben Eastham offer a series of short biographies on eight great works of twenty-first century art by Martin Creed, Barry McGee, Camille Henrot, Marina Abramovic, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, Erwin Wurm, Michaël Borremans, and Gregory Crewdson. They follow these paintings, films, installations, experiences, experiments, sculptures, and performances through all the key stages of their existence so far – from the delicate quiet of the studio to the grand chaos of the art world. A funny, engaging, personal guide through the world of art today, My Life as a Work of Art takes as its starting point the only really important thing: the work of art itself.
‘A luminous tale about the courage of the lone female artist.’ Joan London Born in Germany in 1876, Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first female artist to paint herself not only naked but pregnant. Being Here is a moving account of the life of this ground-breaking Expressionist painter, by the acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq. As her art evolves, Paula is torn between Paris and her home in northern Germany. In Paris she can focus on her work, and mix with artists like Rodin and Monet, or her close friend the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. But Germany is home, and that’s where her painter husband Otto lives. Darrieussecq thrillingly describes Paula’s discovery of her style and choi...
A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography. In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the tran...
In 2017 the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction for $450m. But is it a real da Vinci? In a thrilling narrative built on formidable research, Ben Lewis tracks the extraordinary journey of a masterpiece lost and found, lied and fought over across the centuries.
British poet Stephen Spender (1909-95), through his life spanning the 20th century, befriended, collected or was otherwise connected to a pantheon of artists such as Arp, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Giacometti, Gorky, Guston, Hockney, Moore, Morandi, Picasso and others. Including examples of their work as well Spender's poems chosen by Auerbach, this publication is addressed to what Spender termed the "shared subject matter" of art and literature. Interweaving poetry, essay, artwork and generous archival photographs, The Worlds of Stephen Spender: I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great takes for its inspiration themes that preoccupied Spender and which have taken on a renewed urgency: art's movement across borders; collaboration between artists and writers; solidarity against their censorship; and the moral responsibility of the creative individual in times of social crisis.
'A nail-biting read.' – LoveReading4Kids Cats have nine lives. Ben has one. Keeping it will test him to the very limit. An Amazon expedition gone wrong throws Ben into a world of superstition and adventure. Now he must survive the mysterious Jaguar Trials to escape the jungle and uncover the truth about the lost City of Gold. In this spellbinding children's adventure, award-winning author Ruth Eastham teaches us the value of friendship, and helps us to discover that there is more than just one kind of treasure.
Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary, imaginary museum. Stand in front of some of the most incomprehensible art works in the world with an expert guide by your side, full of personal stories, expertise and human understanding. In a stunningly original memoir and art guide we find ourselves among outrageous artworks, and we return again and again to the same question: "But what does it mean?" With the help of a cast of critics, guards, curators, artists, protestors and ghosts, Eastham explores the idea that the value of art is not to be found in what it means, but in what it does to you. This is an argument to forget about what is and is not art and to instead think courageously and creatively about how things really make you feel. You don't have to like the art works in this or any gallery, you don't have to fully understand them either, but we can benefit from existing alongside them. And in doing so we learn about ourselves, and each other.