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This book offers an unpredictable, humorous, and politically unconstrained perspective on today's heated debates about the meaning and role of beauty in art and contemporary society.
In 1999 the artist and art critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe published the now classic Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. The book was an alternative history of art and its relationship to technology and an argument for the return of beauty in contemporary art. It was seen as part of a whole wave of books advocating the revival of aesthetics in the wake of postmodernism. Gilbert-Rolfe's book wasunusual, however, in that it made its case using the same French theory as the postmodernism it opposed. Art after Deconstruction continues Gilbert-Rolfe's argument for the return of aesthetics in contemporary art.
This book focuses on two projects, Gehry's unrealised proposal for the rehabilitation of Berlin's Museum Island and his soon to be completed Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe brings to Melville's work the insight not only of an art critic and theorist, but of a practicing artist as well. Navigating through the complexity of contemporary thought and philosophy, Gilbert-Rolfe unravels the Gordian knot of the diverse discourses that circumscribe Melville's views, revealing the practicality and clarity of Melville's speculative narratives. Stephen Melville is one of the most thoughtful critics to emerge in recent years. He has applied the tools developed by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan to the problems of contemporary art. With his roots in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, he reopens questions of art's reception, interpretation, and commentary. Not only does he articulate the limitations of these categories, and how they are set into motion-stasis and balance are not the goal. He demonstrates how the territory of each of these discourses is maintained by their relationship to one another. Melville's texts not only represent the complexity of his subjec
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe brings to Melville's work the insight not only of an art critic and theorist, but of a practicing artist as well. Navigating through the complexity of contemporary thought and philosophy, Gilbert-Rolfe unravels the Gordian knot of the diverse discourses that circumscribe Melville's views, revealing the practicality and clarity of Melville's speculative narratives. Stephen Melville is one of the most thoughtful critics to emerge in recent years. He has applied the tools developed by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan to the problems of contemporary art. With his roots in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, he reopens questions of art's reception, interpretation, and commentary. Not only does he articulate the limitations of these categories, and how they are set into motion-stasis and balance are not the goal. He demonstrates how the territory of each of these discourses is maintained by their relationship to one another. Melville's texts not only represent the complexity of his subjec
In the early 20th century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. In an age of secularism and materialism, artworks would be understood as merely things among other things. This meant an attack on the techniques of realism, and the traditional mission of the museum, both designed shield a small class of objects from the entropic fate awaiting everything else-and the development of an approach that Boris Groys calls "direct realism": an art that would not produce objects, but practices that could enter the flow of time to live and die like the rest of us. But for more than a century now, every advance in this direction has been quickly follo...
The Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) is best known for abstract, large-format works produced using pliage: the painting of a crumpled, gathered, or systematically pleated canvas that the artist then unfolds and stretches for exhibition. In her study of this profoundly influential artist, Molly Warnock presents a persuasive historical account of his work, his impact on a younger generation of French artists, and the genesis and development of the practice of pliage over time. Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting covers the entirety of Hantaï’s expansive oeuvre, from his first aborted experiments with folding around 1950 to his post-pliage experiments with dig...
Edited by Diana Thater. Text by Kent Nagano, Bernhart Schwenk.
Often labelled as ‘indescribable’, the sublime is a term that has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists. Usually related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. Offering historical overviews and explanations, Philip Shaw looks at: the legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the postmodern and avant-garde sublimity the major theorists of the sublime such as Kant, Burke, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek, offering critical introductions to each the significance of the concept through a range of literary readings including the Old and New testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the romantic era how the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch’s neo-noir. This remarkably clear study of what is, in essence, a term which evades definition, is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory.
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