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Books : Arts & Photography : Schools, Periods & Styles : Contemporary Art
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Banksy, Britain's now-legendary "guerilla" street artist, has painted the walls, streets, and bridges of towns and cities throughout the world. Not only did he smuggle his pieces into four of New York City's major art museums, he's also "hung" his work at London's Tate Gallery and adorned Israel's West Bank barrier with satirical images. Banksy's identity remains unknown, but his work is unmistakable—with prints selling for as much as $45,000.
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With art drawn from a wide variety of sources — books, graphic novels, video games, films, galleries, and advertising — Spectrum 15 reinforces both the importance and prevalence of fantasy art in today’s culture. Featuring over 300 exceptional works by artists from around the globe, this gorgeous full-color collection celebrates a cadre of creators working in every style and medium. Included are luminaries such as Brom, James Gurney, Marc Gabanna, Shaun Tan, and 2008’s Grand Master Award winner, John Jude Palencar.
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A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art.
The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion.
In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.
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Rings of seahorses that seem to rotate on the page. Butterflies that transform right before your eyes into two warriors with their horses. A mosaic portrait of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau made from seashells. These dazzling and often playful artistic creations manipulate perspective so cleverly that they simply outwit our brains: we can’t just take a quick glance and turn away. They compel us to look once, twice, and over and over again, as we try to figure out exactly how the delightful trickery manages to fool our perceptions so completely. Of course, first and foremost, every piece is beautiful on the surface, but each one offers us so much more. From Escher’s famous and elaborate “Waterfall” to Shigeo Fukuda’s “Mary Poppins,” where a heap of bottles, glasses, shakers, and openers somehow turn into the image of a Belle Epoque woman when the spotlight hits them, these works of genius will provide endless enjoyment.
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This survey features more than 400 works from the Polaroid Collection along with essays by Hitchcock, who illuminates the beginnings and history of the Polaroid Corporation.
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This final volume of previously unpublished drawings and photographs completes the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia trilogy. Danzig Baldaev's unparallelled ethnographic achievement, documenting more than 3,000 tattoo drawings, was made during a lifetime working as a prison guard. His recording of this esoteric world was reported to the KGB, who unexpectedly supported him, realizing the importance of being able to establish facts about convicts by reading the images on their bodies. The motifs depicted represent the uncensored lives of the criminal classes, ranging from violence and pornography to politics and alcohol. A medieval knight is surrounded by the severed heads of his enemies, a naked woman simultaneously services a man and two dwarfs, a crying President Gorbachev grips a human bone between sabre-like fangs, a group of angels drink vodka with God on a cloud--the meanings of these arresting images are explained to the uninitiated eye. Sergei Vasiliev's graphic photographs show the grim reality of the Russian prison system and some of the alarming characters that inhabit it, while the illustrated criminals of Russia tell the tale of their closed society. This last volume in the trilogy includes an introduction by historian Alexander Sidorov exploring the origins of the Russian criminal tattoo and their various meanings today.
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Takashi Murakami is one of contemporary art’s most innovative and important figures. Drawing from street culture, high art, and traditional Japanese painting, Murakami takes the contemporary art trend of mixing high and low to an unprecedented level (critics call him the new Warhol), producing original paintings and sculptures as well as mass-produced consumer objects such as toys, books, and most famously, a line of handbags for Louis Vuitton. A committed supporter and spokesperson for Japanese artists and a powerful commentator on postwar culture and society, Murakami has organized influential exhibitions of Japanese art as well as a biannual art fair in Tokyo. Murakami has positioned himself as a new type of artist for the twenty-first century: a hybrid of creator, entrepreneur, and cultural ambassador.In conjunction with the first major retrospective of his work, Murakami traces Murakami’s global impact socially, culturally, and art historically. Essays focus on Murakami’s early works, which were based on a social critique of Japan’s rampant consumerism; the development of his characters; his work with anime, fantasy; otaku culture; and his engagement with global pop culture. Representing output from original works of art to mass-produced multiples, the catalogue also considers the implications of Murakami’s working methods within the tradition of the Western avant-garde.
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The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky's exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow's happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord's celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. This publication collects texts that place this artistic development in historical and theoretical context.
Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière's influential "Problems and Transformations in Critical Art." The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
Copublished with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
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In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world's greatest art detective.
The Rescue Artist is a rollicking narrative that carries readers deep inside the art underworld -- and introduces them to a large and colorful cast of titled aristocrats, intrepid investigators, and thick-necked thugs. But most compelling of all is Charley Hill himself, a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm whose hunt for a purloined treasure would either cap an illustrious career or be the fiasco that would haunt him forever.
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Antonio Lopez Garcia is one of Spain's most revered contemporary artists. Bringing his profound visual sensitivity and mastery of light to bear on a range of deliberately quotidian subjects, Lopez Garcia imbues them with an extraordinary and haunting character. In 1993, his paintings and drawings were given a major retrospective at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, while Victor Erice's 1992 documentary about Lopez Garcia, The Quince Tree of the Sun, received the Critics' Prize at that year's Cannes and top prize at the Chicago Film Festival. Yet Lopez Garcia's work has rarely been exhibited outside his native country. This book, published to accompany the first major exhibition of his art in the United States (in tandem with the MFA's monumental El Greco to Velazquez exhibition), offers the first comprehensive overview in English of this extraordinary oeuvre. An essay by curator Cheryl Brutvan discusses Lopez Garcia as a descendant of the great Spanish naturalists, as well as his indebtedness to Surrealism and "magic realism," while individual appreciations of some 50 paintings offer English-speaking readers their first opportunity to appreciate in depth the remarkable poetry and atmospheric density of this major world artist.
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Artist Tara Donovan uses commonplace consumer materials--toothpicks, tape, pencils, buttons, paper plates, and the like--to create her dazzling sculptural installations. Often biomorphic or topographical in character, her large-scale abstract works utilize systematic arrangements of thousands or even millions of units. Visually evocative and perceptually seductive, her pieces are at once organic and highly structured. Donovan has been recognized for her commitment to process and her ability to discover how the inherent physical characteristics of an object might allow it to be transformed into art.
Published in conjunction with a major solo exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, this book is the first to document Donovan's complete oeuvre, from her beginnings working in ink to her most recent pieces. Among the many works shown are Untitled (Plastic Cups), a 50-by-60-foot landscape of plastic cups; Haze, a 42-foot-long wall of over two million clear plastic drinking straws stacked like wood; and her three 40-inch cubes, one of steel pins, one of toothpicks, and one of shattered glass. An in-depth conversation between Donovan and Lawrence Weschler traces the artist's schooling, early career, and current work.
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When Cajun artist George Rodrigue began his series of Blue Dog paintings in 1984, he had no idea that they would consume the greater part of his life for over two decades, and that the mysterious Blue Dog—inspired by his studio dog–turned-model, Tiffany, and the Cajun loup-garou folk legend—would become a wildly popular international icon as well. Blue Dog Speaks is the first book to prominently emphasize Rodrigue’s painting titles, one of the most important elements in the creation of a Blue Dog painting, alongside the works. Rodrigue uses Blue Dog painting titles to provide insight—whether humorous or nostalgic or sad—into the human condition.
In an introduction, Rodrigue reveals how an idea that originated in childhood tales has now grown far beyond; his Blue Dogs have moved beyond Louisiana into formerly uncharted territory and now express larger concepts about contemporary life. His newer titles—such as Right Place Wrong Time and Tiffany Remembers the ’70s—along with other, more abstract ones such as All by Myself with My Happiness capture this shift in style and content.
But most of all, there are the paintings themselves, magnificently displayed, their titles inviting us to ask “What is this dog all about?” and “What is the artist trying to say?” Even though the definitive answers remain a mystery, the titles provide a clue…
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Unless you regularly trawl the Chelsea galleries, hang out at the Tate Modern, peruse the Pompidou, attend every Biennale, and religiously read Artforum, you could likely use a primer on the art scene in the world today. Fortunately we've created our second "Art Now" volume to keep art fans abreast of the latest trends and hottest names. Not only will you discover the most important artists in the international art market, you'll also learn how the art scene has changed dramatically in recent years - notably with a return to figurative painting and an increase in political topics. Featuring over 135 artists in A-Z entries, plus a special section about gallery representation and current market prices, "Art Now Vol. 2" is the guide to what's happening and who's who in contemporary art.The A-Z artist entries include: short biography; exhibition history and bibliographical information; and, images of important recent work.
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"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death.
With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.
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TASCHEN's 25th anniversary ? Special edition! Large-format hardcover edition at a special bestseller price ?Everything is beautiful, ? raved Andy Warhol, in raptures at the glamour of modern life, consumer society, and the world of the media and its stars; his proclamation can be considered the maxim of the pop generation, which included artists Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Richard Hamilton, among others. The pop artists of the 1960s had a profound effect on the cloth of art history and their influence can be clearly seen in art today. Here, Tilman Osterwald explores the styles, themes, and sources of pop art around the world.
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"Robert Irwin, perhaps the most influential of the California artists, moved from his beginnings in abstract expressionism through successive shifts in style and sensibility, into a new aesthetic territory altogether, one where philosophical concepts of perception and the world interact. Weschler has charted the journey with exceptional clarity and cogency. He has also, in the process, provided what seems to me the best running history of postwar West Coast art that I have yet seen."--Calvin Tomkins
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Drawn from work created for books, comics, magazines, art galleries, advertisements, and the portfolios of the finest contemporary fantasy artists, the illustrations in Spectrum 14 extend the boundaries of the imagination and explore new realms of creativity. The book contains nearly 350 pieces by creators spanning the globe, including works from America, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Korea, Australia, Japan, Canada, and France. Now in its 14th year, this is a must for fans of this genre of art as well as an invaluable resource for art directors and illustrators.
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A portrait of the artist by the artist himself (TASCHEN's 25th anniversary special edition) Friedensreich Hundertwasser: born as Friedrich Stowasser, he lived and died as Friedensreich (meaning "realm of peace") Hundertwasser?a name he chose for himself. Architect, ecologist, painter, designer, writer, innovator? his list of talents goes on and on. Hundertwasser reinvented the art of living as an artist 24 hours a day. This book comprises Volume I from the limited-edition Hunderstwasser book set, with selected paintings, architecture works, projects, and manifestos. The text by Wieland Schmied, a longtime personal friend of Hundertwasser, traces the life and work of one of the century's most fascinating artistic personalities. Produced in collaboration with Hundertwasser (who supervised the project and designed the layout himself) just before his untimely death, this book is not only a testament to his unparallelled career but a living legacy.