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A collection of essays on idiosyncratic art.
This book presents a refreshing new approach to avant-garde art by demonstrating that a genuine core of modernism manifests a positive, life-affirming attitude. Donald Kuspit and Lynn Gamwell challenge the assumption that disintegration and negativity provide the most authentic artistic responses to this century's gloomy zeitgeist. Lavishly illustrated, their book includes colorful images of paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, as well as photographs of spectacular gardens.
Few art critics in Western art history have ever had the broad-ranging impact over several decades of Donald Kuspit, a philosopher and psychoanalyst who from 1970 until the present has been a commanding figure on the international stage. A student of German thinker Theodor Adorno under whom he earned the first of his three doctorates, Kuspit introduced a new type of philosophical art criticism into the art world. He drew on both phenomenology and Critical Theory before he then increasingly adopted psychoanalysis. Since Kuspit himself has always measured his own place in the history of art criticism by how rigorously he engages with competing approaches, this book is a searching survey of Kus...
Donald Kuspit argues here that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import. Art has been replaced by "postart," a term invented by Alan Kaprow, as a new visual category that elevates the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred, cleverness over creativity. Tracing the demise of aesthetic experience to the works and theory of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman, Kuspit argues that devaluation is inseparable from the entropic character of modern art, and that anti-aesthetic postmodern art is in its final state. In contrast to modern art, which expressed the universal human unconscious, postmodern art degenerates into an expression of narrow ideological interests. In reaction to the emptiness and stagnancy of postart, Kuspit signals the aesthetic and human future that lies with the old masters. The End of Art points the way to the future for the visual arts. Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History at SUNY Stony Brook. A winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, Professor Kuspit is a Contributing Editor at Artforum, Sculpture and New Art Examiner. His most recent book is The Cult of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 1994).
Essay by Donald Kuspit The first monograph by famed actor and director Leonard Nimoy, this eerily beautiful photographic study of the female form reveals Nimoy's intrigue with Old Testament mythology and ancient spirituality. The Shekhina, described by the Kabbala as God's feminine counterpart, is understood by mystics to be a crucial element of both divine and human spirit, symbolising the creativity and wisdom without which no being is complete. Here, Nimoy uses 50 duotone photos as an exhaustive investigation of his own spirituality.
Few art critics in Western history have had the lasting international impact of philosopher and psychoanalyst Donald Kuspit. A student of Theodor Adorno, Kuspit introduced in the 1970s a new type of philosophical art criticism drawing on critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Dense and demanding, yet deft and incisive, this multifaceted art criticism has gained world renown for reasons that critics, art historians, and philosophers from around the world explain here. The first book about one of the most distinguished art critics in history, Dialectical Conversions is a searching survey of Kuspit's role in triggering several historic shifts within art criticism.
This book assembles twenty years of work in dramatic color photographs, a magnificent mid-career survey of a remarkable sculptor who turns nature into art.
The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century examines the continued validity and variety of painting in the postmodern era. Bringing a psychological perspective to the issues, Donald Kuspit argues that painting remains the premiere medium of the visual arts. He discusses a range of representational and abstract painting in the United States and Europe by artists such as Gregory Amenoff, Vincent Desiderio and Odd Nerdrum, and also examines works by Picasso, Mondrian, Pollock, Johns, and Soutine, among others, with an eye to reevaluating their art historical significance.
This long-overdue monograph relates the fascinating story of the son of great surrealist, master Max Ernst and a Jewish mother killed in the Holocaust.
This vivid monograph examines the often surprising and stunning sculpture of Hans Van de Bovenkamp. He is best known for his groundbreaking work in public sculpture. His art covers a myriad of sculptural objects located in accessible open places. 92 colour & 35 b/w illustrations